Brown Neon

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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 Gutirrezs 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.

Reviews

The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022
Vogue, "12 New Queer Books to Read This Summer"
The Millions, Most Anticipated
Oprah Daily, Must-Read Books by Latinx Authors
TODAY, 18 Most Anticipated Latino Books of 2022
Electric Literature, Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of 2022
Latinx in Publishing, Most Anticipated 2022 Latinx Books
Bustle, Most Anticipated Books of 2022

In these essays by a poet, arts writer, and self-identified queer brown butch, encounters in Los Angeles and the Southwest with aging punks, border activists, lesbian legends, and others give rise to explorations of Latinx identity, cultural resistance, and the role of art. . . . The landscape cannot be separated from its history of violence, and there is no desert vista that doesnt have the uncanny attached to it. The New Yorker

Singular and inimitable . . . focusing much of the collection on the physical land that has alternately sustained, commodified, and criminalized so many modes of being. Emma Specter, Vogue

An essay cant listen, but these come close, leaving room for questions left unanswered and realities left unlived. . . . Ambitious in scope and narrative structure, perhaps most impressive is the way in which [Gutirrez] conquers such disparate terrain . . . to reveal how much connection we all share. There is no way to separate the political from the personal, no wall that could keep us from bleeding into one another. By blurring these lines, Gutirrez invites us to consider how walls and borders are illusory, arbitrary, and restrictive. Freedom, alternatively, is something in motion. Rachel Len, Los Angeles Review of Books

Ferrets out the subterranean forces that fuel relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the land that marks our identity. Whether it is creating a cartography of queerness through family lineage and propinquity or digging through the layers of sorrow, love, and trauma to uncover the true borders and frontiers of our identity, each essay offers a unique consciousness at work. Ernesto Mestre-Reed, Oprah Daily

Poet Gutirrez meditates on geography, gender, creativity, and love in her lyrical debut collection. . . . Written with energy, critical acumen, and raw emotion, this is as memorable as it is original. Publishers Weekly

How do we map the terrains of love, land, and art Gutierrez engages these questions through stories of the borders that bind and those that break. . . . A bold and brave debut collection from an intriguing new literary voice. A probing, tender reckoning with space, place, and identity. Kirkus

While art undergirds much of the collection, this is largely an exploration of Donna Haraways notion of oddkincultural/social/emotional family through, in Gutirrezs case, queerness, art-making, Latinx identity, and the Southwest. The relationships she fosters and interrogates, as carefully as she does physical structures and art production, are what drive these essays. Diana Arterian, Literary Hub

Ranging from memoir to criticism to travelogue. . . . By exploring the places where stories are set, Gutirrez reveals more about whos in them. Nick Moran, The Millions

With wit, curiosity, and compassion, Gutirrez analyzes the real, material dangers caused by these made-up borders between us while also scrutinizing their existence. . . . Gutirrez skillfully maps the realities, struggles, and joys of queer, Latinx, artistic life in the Southwest U.S. while also calling all readers to deconstruct the borders and boundaries that plague their own communities. Stef Rubino, Autostraddle

A tribute to the power of art to provoke and challenge its viewers, the essays of Brown Neon are timely and affecting as they consider the nuances of queer Latinx life in the American Southwest. Rebecca Hussey, Foreword Reviews

Thoughtfully tackles questions of gender, sexuality, and performance. K.W. Colyard, Bustle

Brown Neon is a work of Latinx mysticism. With beauty, and unmistakable care for person and place, Raquel Gutirrez maps lifes butchest, sweetest, and saddest mysteries. Myriam Gurba

Brown Neon emerges as an instant foundational text, and Raquel Gutirrez as a leading critic, witness, and visionary not only of the queer, brown Southwest, but our current American nightmare. Gutirrezs 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 Gutirrez 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, Gutirrez 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 Bio

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.