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Both queer people and Chicanx people have to go through the experience of living in between worlds. Queer Chicanx people in turn have to navigate many different forms of nepantla, in which they are forced to exist in many conflicting identities simultaneously. Queer Chicanx people have to deal with being queer in multiple homophobic cultures, exist in nepantla due to their queer identities, and operate in the intersection of both Chicanx and Queer experiences. Saenz’s Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe demonstrates the many different ways the Queer Chicanx people exist in nepantla, through his portrayal of Aristotle and Dante’s personal journeys through nepantla.

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Aristotle and Dante: Existing as Queer Chicanxs in Nepantla

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Aristotle and Dante: Existing as Queer Chicanxs in Nepantla

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Honeybee Payne

Dr. Loya

ENGL364

8 December 2023

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The Intersectionality of being Chicanx and being Queer

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The Intersectionality of being Chicanx and being Queer

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Existing as a Queer Person in a Homophobic Culture

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Existing as a Queer Person in a Homophobic Culture

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Anzaldua, Gloria. “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness.” Borderlands / La Frontera. P. 20. 1st ed., Aunt Lute Book Company, San Francisco, CA, 1987.

Esparza, René. “Queering the Homeland: Chicanidad, Racialized Homophobia, and the Political Economy of Homopatriarchy.” Feminist Formations, vol. 29, no. 2, 2017, pp. 147–176, doi.org/10.1353/ff.2017.0020

Keating, AnaLouise. “Nepantla.” Anzaldúan Theory Handbook, Duke University Press, 2022.

Licona, Adela C. ‘(B)Orderlands’ Rhetorics and Representations: The Transformative Potential of Feminist Third-Space Scholarship and Zines.” NWSA Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, 2005, pp. 104–129, doi.org/10.2979/NWS.2005.17.2.104.

Pérez, Daniel Enrique. “Toward a Mariposa Consciousness: Reimagining Queer Chicano and Latino Identities.” Aztlán, vol. 39, no. 2, 2014, pp. 95–127. www.ingentaconnect.com/content/csrc/aztlan/2014/00000039/00000002/art00006#expand/collapse

Soto, Sandra K. “Cherrie Moraga’s Going Brown: ‘Reading Like a Queer.’” GLQ, vol. 11, no. 2, 2005, pp. 237–263, doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11-2-237

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As gay men, Ari and Dante both exist in a state of nepantla throughout the course of the nobel. However, despite the fact that they are both in the same type of nepantla, it manifests in wildly different ways for the two boys.

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Ari’s entire character arc revolves around his journey through nepantla, and ends once he slowly begins to accept his existence as someone perpetually in between identities. Throughout the whole novel Ari is experiencing immense amounts of anxiety, uncertainty about the future, emotional pain, and loss of control. These are just a few of the many things that one experiences in the state of nepantla. (Keating 156). This is because his identity as a queer man is in direct competition with his identity as a Catholic, and his Chicano identity. In fact, this conflict is so strong that he doesn’t even realize that he’s queer until he’s given an outside push.

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Dante, on the other hand, is very aware of his existence as a queer man. His existence in Nepantla is not a refusal to acknowledge his conflicting identities, it’s a struggle to find a way to exist in both of his identities at the same time. People in nepantla do not only have to learn how to exist in contradiction, they have to learn how to be comfortable in that state of contradiction. While that state of contradiction can be incredibly emotionally taxing, it is existing in this state that drives social change. (Anzaldua 81). We see this in his initial conversations with Ari as he first comes to terms with his queerness. He’s scared of the future, he’s uncertain what his identity means for his relationship with his parents and with his best friend, and yet he immediately dives into pushing social boundaries. He doesn’t hesitate to come out to Ari, and he knows that he’ll come out to his parents eventually, he just doesn’t know when. His concern is not if he will be able to reconcile his two identities, it's when and how this will happen.

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every day i live in fear that they’re going to catch me.

one day they’re going to notice that i killed their little girl

and took her place.

one day someone is going to tell them

that i shift to my real self when they look away.

one day they’re going to turn to me when i’m not ready

and they’re going to see me instead of her.

what happens then?

what happens when they notice that

i’m not who i’m pretending to be?

what happens when they catch me?

-shapeshifter, honeybee payne

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I heavily relate to Ari not realizing that he was queer until the end of the novel. I remember being weirdly excited when gay marriage was first legalized and not knowing why. Facebook did a promotion where you could change your profile photo to have a rainbow overlay in celebration of the verdict. I did it as all my friends were doing it, but only had it up for a few hours until I was told by my family that gay marriage wasn’t a good thing and that I had to take it down. Even though I was only 12 at the time, I had a few friends who were openly queer, and so I just told myself that I was happy for their sake. I  thought that was the reason why I was so upset about being told that the legalizing gay marriage was a bad thing.  I wasn’t ready to accept the fact that I function both as a member of my (violently homophobic) family, and as a queer person myself. Gay people couldn’t be bad people, because my friends were gay, and they were good people. The same way that Ari assumes that his anger about Dante being attacked is purely because he cares about Dante, and not because he’s queer himself.

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As queer people in a homophobic society, Ari and Dante are forced to exist in nepantla. They are both queer and participating members of society. This manifests in many different ways. They are Chicanos. They are Catholics. They are Americans. All of these groups are largely homophobic. And yet, the two exist as queer people within those structures

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For Dante, a lot of his fears come from the fact that he already doesn’t feel like a “real” Mexican, and his identity as a queer man is just another nail in the coffin for this belief. He’s already a pretty feminine man, something which isn’t accepted both in American and Mexican society. Through colonization, Mexican culture has evolved to uphold masculinity and look down upon femininity. This can lead to a great deal of internalized homophobia in queer Chicano men. (Perez 101-102) We can clearly see this manifest in Dante’s experiences with how he perceives himself. He already doesn’t feel like “enough” of a person in his own culture, and his queerness only distances himself from that further.

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For Ari, this existence as a queer person in a homophobic culture manifests itself as him not knowing his place in the world. This is a struggle that he deals with for most of the novel. He cannot exist as a queer person, because he is comfortable in his identity as a Chicano man. The two are not compatible in his mind. For many queer people in homophobic cultures, they struggle to switch between their multiple identities. They exist in a third space, where they are not one thing or the other, but they are both. To see both identities as mutually exclusive comes with a great deal of anxiety. (Licona 105-106). We see this anxiety present in him when Dante first asks to kiss him, and when his parents confront him about his feelings for Dante. In both situations, Ari pushes back, because he feels like he’s being placed into a role that isn’t for him. However, it is for him, he just needs to come to terms with the fact that he can play both roles at the same time. This journey is one that is incredibly difficult for queer people in all different kinds of homophobic cultures.

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The characters of Aristotle and Dante both exist in a state of Nepantla regarding their sexuality, and yet they exist in such different forms of it. They are in the same state, and yet are experiencing completely different things. Ari spends the entirety of the novel in denial about his sexuality and who he is as a person. Dante, however, is aware of his sexuality from the very beginning, and is quick to accept this fact about himself. Ari’s nepantla centers around discovering who he is as a person, while Dante’s nepantla centers around coming to terms with who he is as a person. It takes Ari almost 300 pages of the novel to even realize that he is in love with Dante, and even then, this only occurs when he gets an outside push from his parents. However, as soon as he realizes he’s in love with Dante, he becomes “a free man.” There is no internal debate. Dante, on the other hand, is very nonchalant about the fact that he likes men, but spends a good portion of the novel struggling to accept that he’s not hurting the people he loves by being gay.

The characters of Aristotle and Dante both exist in a state of Nepantla regarding their sexuality, and yet they exist in such different forms of it. They are in the same state, and yet are experiencing completely different things. Ari spends the entirety of the novel in denial about his sexuality and who he is as a person. Dante, however, is aware of his sexuality from the very beginning, and is quick to accept this fact about himself. Ari’s nepantla centers around discovering who he is as a person, while Dante’s nepantla centers around coming to terms with who he is as a person. It takes Ari almost 300 pages of the novel to even realize that he is in love with Dante, and even then, this only occurs when he gets an outside push from his parents. However, as soon as he realizes he’s in love with Dante, he becomes “a free man.” There is no internal debate. Dante, on the other hand, is very nonchalant about the fact that he likes men, but spends a good portion of the novel struggling to accept that he’s not hurting the people he loves by being gay.

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Coming to terms with being queer is something that is incredibly hard to do, especially when you come from a culture that is homophobic. We especially see Dante struggling with this in his letters to Ari. This section of the novel was particularly impactful for me to read because I relate so heavily with Dante and his feelings. Even though there is nothing wrong with being queer, there is a sense of mourning that you have to go through when you first realize that you're queer. The fact that you’re not going to live the life that you always thought you were supposed to live is something that is hard to accept. This is especially true when it comes to parents. Unlike Dante, the choice to come out to my parents is an “if” choice, and not a “when” choice. However, I can relate to him being more worried about his dad’s reaction than his mom’s. I wish it didn’t happen at all, but I'm grateful that when someone outed me to my family, it was to my mother. I still don’t know who it was that told her, but I remember her locking me in her bedroom and confronting me. She spent hours lecturing me about how being queer is not what God wants for me, and how I needed to stop choosing to be gay to avoid going to Hell. When she finally let me back into my room, I felt exactly the same way Dante felt in Chicago. I remember repeating to myself “I wish I was just straight.” over and over again. His feelings of guilt for “disappointing” the people that he loves especially hit me in the gut, but I also know that it’s an experience that’s universal with many queer people.

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Something that I very quickly noticed in this novel is the frequent use of repetition in order to emphasize certain points. I thought it was interesting that repetition was used in this way because it really goes to show how caught up in his mind Ari is as a person. He repeats lines a lot because he thinks about the same few things a lot. The more circular his thinking is, the more repetition shows up in his lines. In the except where he is explaining why he got into the fight on Dante’s behalf, he utilizes heavy repetition. This is because in this passage he is thinking about Dante and Dante only. However, the only one of these passages from Ari’s perspective that doesn’t heavily utilize repetition is the passage where Ari first discusses his feelings about coming to terms with his sexuality. For the first time in his life, he’s not thinking in circles, he’s just existing.

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While it is already incredibly difficult to exist as a queer person here in America, there is an added layer of oppression that is added when you are Chicanx. For Ari and Dante, as Chicanos, this means that there is extra pain that comes with their existence as gay men. They aren’t safe in American culture, but they aren’t safe in their own culture either. In a struggle to combat racism, communities of color in America have a tendency to cast out those who don’t fit their “perfect” ideal. (Esperanza 161). For Ari, this manifests as him rejecting the queer side of himself to fit in with Chicano culture. For Dante, the opposite is true, and he consistently refers to himself as not a "real Mexican" because his identity causes him to feel so outcast.

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Saenz uses the extended metaphor of tennis shoes in order to showcase Dante's complicated relationship with his queer and Chicano identities. Over the course of the story, Dante’s mother is constantly scolding Dante for hating his shoes, and taking them off whenever he can. In the novel, Dante’s shoes serve as a symbol for the oppression of heterosexual gender roles. He removes his shoes most often when he’s with Ari, and when he’s at the movies with Ari, he outright forgets his shoes altogether. He also convinces Ari to participate in this as well, when they play their shoe game in the streets. Ari tells himself that he's just humoring Dante, but he finds himself enjoying being without his shoes as well. Similarly, when Dante asks Ari to kiss him, Ari tells himself that he's just doing it to humor Dante, but he ends up enjoying it as well.

However, Dante's mother is always on his case about removing his shoes, as she doesn’t want him to be seen as just another Mexican stereotype. Similarly, Chicanx communities sometimes look down on men as they don’t want them to be seen as the substandard man that Chicanos are often perceived as (Perez 101-102). It's important to note that it's not the shoes themselves that she has a problem with, its the perception that other people will have of Dante because of his shoes. In the same vein, she's completely fine with him actually being queer, she just worries about the way he will be treated because of his identity.

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In Ari’s case, he takes a long time to even realize that he queer in the first place, because he considers his identity as a Chicano man to be contradictory to his existence as a gay man. Being a queer person is inherently disruptive to one’s existence in Chicanx culture, and can cause a lot of pain, anxiety, and shame. (Soto 244). While Ari’s existence as a gay man isn’t the cause of all of the emotional pain that he feels in his life, it is certainly part of it. He doesn’t feel like he can fully keep up with his peers because he doesn’t quite fit in with them. At the beginning of the novel, he overhears two lifeguards discussing the female body, and immediately mentally disconnects himself from them. He acknowledges that their behavior is sexist, but he also acknowledges that most men do behave like that, and he's just different. One of the ways that he reconciles this disconnect is by getting into frequent fights, something that is seen as extremely masculine in his culture. We see multiple times in the novel that his first instinct is to solve problems with violence, which in part comes from his desperation to make up for not completely being able to relate to his peers. His behavior also mimics the behavior of the men in his life. He keeps his emotions bottled up because that's what he's learned from his father. He resorts to violence when things get rough because that's all he knows of his brother.

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While Dante is quick to accept his identity as a queer man, he struggles in nepantla because he believes it to be incompatible with his identity as a Chicano. We can see this when he refers to himself as his parents only son, despite the fact that he's their only child. He's not concerned that they'll think less of him as their child, he's concerned they'll see him as less of a man. We also see this in the beginning of the passage, when he mentions being afraid of his Dad's reaction first, and then adds his mother on as more of an afterthought. However, Dante also knows that he is going to have to tell them eventually. He talks about "when" he's going to come out, not "if". He also repeats the word "wonder" in this passage, showing that this is something that has been on his mind for a while. Both of these details show his security in his queer identity, but this security comes at the cost of additional insecurity with his identity as a Chicano man.

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Being queer means that you exist in multiple forms of nepantla, and the types of nepantla that a queer person finds themselves in only increases when one is also Chicanx. Since Chicano culture celebrates masculinity and looks down on femininity, to be a queer man means to be seen as a “lesser” Chicano. Chicano culture also discourages queerness as American society already looks down on Chicanos as lesser men, and they don’t want that stereotype to be encouraged. We see these issues manifest in Dante’s journey through nepantla, where he is very confident in his identity as a queer man, but is much less confident in his identity as a Chicano.

Ari, on the other hand, is traveling through a very different kind of nepantla. Being queer is inherently disruptive to one’s experience as a Chicanx, and this disruption can be incredibly painful. For many queer people who live in homophobic societies, they struggle because they feel like they feel like they need to go back and forth between their two identities. They can be one, and then they can switch to the other, but they can’t be both simultaneously. However, this is not how they actually exist as nepantleras. They are both, and they are both at the same time. It can be a struggle for queer Chicanxs to accept this, as Chicano culture can homophobic at times, and queer culture in America is so centered around whiteness.

By portraying both of these very different manifestations of the same kind of nepantla, Saenz is demonstrating the fact that every queer person’s journey through accepting themselves and their identity is unique, especially when intersectionality comes into the mix. There’s no correct way for queer Chicanxs to travel through nepantla, as long as they are able to reach a point where they are comfortable existing in both identities at once.

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While on the surface, this passage is about Ari being upset on Dante's behalf, there's a deeper emotional tie to his anger. Yes, he is upset that Dante was assaulted, but he's also trying to process that he is gay himself, and the struggles that come with that. We see this when he repeats the line "like he was nothing." Of all the sections to repeat, Saenz chooses this one. This is because he is trying to emphasize the fact that society as a whole sees queer men as "nothing". It's not just the attacker's viewpoint, it's society's. This is also why the attackers are referred to as "they" through the course of the passage. They're representative of societies viewpoints as a whole, and Ari is struggling to realize that this is the way that society will see him as well. This struggle is also why Saenz chooses to have him start crying in the moment that he does. Ari is angry when he discusses how Dante was treated, but he only starts to cry when he talks about why Dante was treated this way. This is because subconsciously he's trying to process the fact that he could be put in the exact same situation due to his queer identity.

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Here we see Ari finally completing his journey through nepantla and accepting his feelings for Dante and his queer identity. He doesn't describe his journey as a struggle through emotions, he describes it as something being "wrong with him." By phrasing it in this way, Saenz shows how being caught in nepantla wasn't just impacting Ari's romance life, it was impacting every aspect of his life. By "always [fighting the answers]" Ari was just prolonging his journey through nepantla and creating more issues for himself. However, when he allowed his mind to be aligned with his feelings, he finally starts to feel free.

Saenz plays with grammar throughout these passages, especially the one about Ari being a "free man." Through his large use of prepositional phrases, and treating certain phrases as proper sentences, Saenz is creating a sense of freedom in the text that reflects the sense of freedom that Ari is feeling. Ari's freedom is a result of his emotional growth and his journey through nepantla, and the language in this passage reflects that. He refers to himself as a "man", when he considered himself a "boy" for most of the novel. He also refers to himself as Aristotle, instead of just Ari. By choosing to have him use his whole name in this manner, Saenz is emphasizing the sense of completeness that Ari is feeling after completing his journey through nepantla.

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a [person] who loves to compartmentalize [things]

reaches inside [themself]

and tries to sort the different [aspects of their personhood]

into nice neat little [boxes].

they gently take themself out of their [bodies]

and place [the pieces of who they are] onto the table.

their hands are bloody their breath is shaky they look down and everypieceofthemselvesistwistedtogether and when they try to pull themapart they cry out in pain they trytoforcethemapart anyway but it doesn’t work the more they try theworsetheymakethemselves feel their vision begins to darken at the edges when they’ve exhausted all their other options they scoop everythingbackintotheirbody and collapse to the floor.

they don't have a box for their personhood. they reach for a pen and scribble a label onto their skin.

[myself].

-[boxes], honeybee payne

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it is a saturday it is august it is a summer under the arizona sun the heat rolls across the desert and 60 seconds after the hottest point of the day a baby is born who belongs to the desert even though they spend most of their life far from it

summertime baby grows up in a land of eternal winter the cold stings their face their teeth clack against each other unwillingly they slip on the ice and they start bleeding and no one helps them up because it’s all part of god's plan they’re supposed to love the winter more than anything else they’re supposed to like it when it snows

they return to the desert once they’re old enough they feel lighter as they run across the sand they realize that they like women they realize that they’re not a woman they look out at the desert sunset and the sky is painted a million bright colors and they yearn. and they yearn. and they yearn and they yearn and they yearn.

-summertime baby, honeybee payne

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When Dante's mother becomes pregnant, Dante becomes obsessed with his brother being more “Mexican” than him. He chooses stereotypically Mexican names when he's picking out names for the baby, and when he talks about his brother with Ari, he constantly talks about how he wants the baby to be everything he's not. He wants his brother to be masculine, and be less emotional, and most importantly, he wants his brother to be straight. Dante considers being straight part of being a Mexican man, and if he can't have that, he at least wants it for his brother.

Dante is bothered so much about his disconnect to his Mexican identity because he considers his Mexican identity and his identity as a man to be intertwined. One of the moments we see this in the novel is when he sees Ari's truck for the first time. The truck is a symbol of Ari's transition into manhood. However, this isn't what Dante points out when he sees it. He instead says that the truck solidifies Ari's identity as a real Mexican.