Overview

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 Gutirrez's debut essay collection, Brown Neon, gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutirrez, 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 multigenerational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutirrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity, and citizenship with curiosity and nuance.

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9781566896375

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Reviews

Brown Neon is a work of Latinx mysticism. With beauty, and unmistakable care for person and place, Raquel Gutierrez maps life's butchest, sweetest, and saddest mysteries. --Myriam Gurba Brown Neon emerges as an instant foundational text, and Raquel Gutierrez as a leading critic, witness, and visionary not only of the queer, brown Southwest, but our current American nightmare. Gutierrez's essays illuminate an otherwise ignored history of pivotal brown aesthetics that have changed the way some of us create and approach art. Beyond essential. --Fernando A. Flores Raquel Gutierrez 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, Gutierrez 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

Brown Neon is a work of Latinx mysticism. With beauty, and unmistakable care for person and place, Raquel Gutierrez maps life's butchest, sweetest, and saddest mysteries. -Myriam Gurba Brown Neon emerges as an instant foundational text, and Raquel Gutierrez as a leading critic, witness, and visionary not only of the queer, brown Southwest, but our current American nightmare. Gutierrez's essays illuminate an otherwise ignored history of pivotal brown aesthetics that have changed the way some of us create and approach art. Beyond essential. -Fernando A. Flores Raquel Gutierrez 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, Gutierrez 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

Author Information

Raquel Gutirrez is an arts critic, writer, poet, and educator. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Gutirrez credits the queer and feminist diy, post-punk zine culture of the 1990s, plus Los Angeles County and Getty paid arts internships, for introducing her/them to the various vibrant art and music scenes and communities throughout Southern California. Gutirrez is a 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism and a 2017 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is/They are faculty for Oregon State UniversityCascades' Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Gutirrez calls Tucson, Arizona, home.

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