This week I’m sharing a snippet of my research for my dissertation entitled “Visceral Encounters: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Queer Latinx Childhood.” I presented this paper at the Latino Studies Association conference in Tempe, AZ last week. Hope you enjoy this more formal post about a novel! I highly recommend the book and audiobook, which is read by the author.
In Julián Delgado Lopera’s 2020 novel Fiebre Tropical, readers are introduced to Colombian migrant realness in the form of Francisca, a 15-year-old goth-adjacent, sexually frustrated teen. Francisca is fresh off the plane from Bogota, living with her mother, sister, and grandmother, and cannot bear the cramped, humid world she encounters in Miami. “Sweat a constant, all the way to my butthole,” Francisca tells us. She goes on: “Dampened skin, fishlike. Water came from all places: the ocean, the sky, the puddles, our armpits, our hands, our asses. Our eyes. Lluvia tropical is nature’s violence. And here it was a lluvia tropical on acid, a fiebre tropical. Tropical fever for days” (Delgado Lopera 13).
Delgado Lopera describes the disorientation of the immigrant experience as an immersion in water, constantly, from all sources. The author gestures toward the grief of migration, and tells us of salty tears coming from our eyes, a kind of water that comes from within. They tell us of water emerging from the pores in our armpits and our buttholes. This salty, stinky booty water is no different, no less important, than our tears. It is a water that ties emotions and desires to our bodies and situated identities. Water in its iterations—sweat, pee, humidity, rain, even blood—are motifs for Delgado Lopera that narrate the specificity of Caribbean Latinx identity as linked to tropical, humid environments. In this way, Delgado Lopera thematizes the processes of migration through the sensorium. Movement across a body of water transforms the migrant body to a permanent state of aquatic being, “fishlike,” they write.
Delgado Lopera’s campy narration embraces nasty, cochina vibes. Sweating from the butthole is profane, seldom discussed, though often felt (I’m sure in this Arizona heat, we are all struggling to stay dry back there). To conjure anality alongside tears and B.O. suggests that to be Caribbean and Latinx in Miami requires an acceptance of the body as always a little disgusting. Our teen narrator, Francisca, becomes emblematic of a kind of sucia Latinx identity, as a queer, horny teen. Francisca is usually sticky, sweaty, and hilariously disgusting. She kisses girls with Cheeto breath, longs to touch their greasy, dandruff ridden hair, and eats nothing but Hot Pockets so she never has to leave her crush’s side (the result, she tells us, is that she cannot poop “for days”). In Fiebre, we find a depiction of queer Latinx migrancy that makes no attempts to sanitize grief or puberty. Rather than assimilating into a desirable, palatable, English-speaking subject at the end of this coming-of-age novel, Francisca remains irreverent and sucia. We even see this reflected in the author’s refusal to italicize Spanish words, instead crafting a distinctly queer Colombian way of being. Delgado Lopera therefore invites us to sit in the “realness” of the sweaty stench of queer Latinx migrant life.
As a Colombian-U.S. author, Delgado Lopera’s writing speaks to the particular experiences of Colombian-U.S. migration, and the ways in which Colombians are racialized in the United States because of their proximity to the Caribbean, histories of economic extraction, and the tropics. Scholars Mark D. Anderson and Marcela Reales utilize an eco-critical lens in their writing on Colombian literature and argue that “nineteenth-century environmental determinism […] justified European neocolonialism by classifying the tropics as pathological spaces that engendered inferior, unbalanced, and ill human inhabitants” (Anderson and Reales 353-364). The novel’s title, Fiebre Tropical, alludes to the pathologization of tropical environments like Colombia, and the ways in which these connotations come to define the inhabitants of those spaces. Delgado Lopera’s guiding allegory produces an alternative sense of Caribbean identity that embraces the ways in which Colombians are marginalized through language of pathology. Further, Delgado Lopera’s unflinching Spanglish, queer camp narration, and gustatory imagery, work together to resignify the ways in which tropicality is wielded to support xenophobic and racialized anxiety. These narrative interventions work together to delve into the space of unruly suciedad to provide alternative and sensuous modes of identification for queer Colombian migrants.
To give a quick summary of the novel, Francisca migrates with her family via plane from Bogota to Miami with her mother and sister to her grandmother’s “ant-infested” townhouse. Her aunt and mother become very involved in the Colombian immigrant evangelical church, whose services are held inside a Hyatt Hotel, because they are undocumented and have a hard time finding work, so the church supports them financially. While there, Francisca falls in love with the pastor’s daughter Carmen, and a homoerotic friendship begins. Once the girls act on their feelings, Carmen shuts down, leaves Miami, and stays with family in Colombia, which leaves Francisca to sort out her identity on her own. In the final pages of the novel, Francisca falls for this hot older girl, and they smoke cigarettes and eat Pop-Tarts while raccoons ransack the garbage cans next to them. They hold hands and make out, and Francisca is filled with relief and begins to cry. So throughout the novel, themes of migration, queerness, and this motif of water, liquids of the body, the body as porous, frame the narration of Francisca’s identity as a “sucia” finding her place in the U.S..
Together, my co-panelists and I are thinking with Deborah Vargas’s notion of “suciedad” as a queer analytic for Latinx life. Suciedad, Vargas tells us, “considers how references to smells of pee and [sticky] bodily sensations are structural metonyms for nonnormative constructions of queer intimacy, sex, kinship, and love in surplus" (Vargas 722). Vargas tells us too that there is a relationship between the dirty or the obscene, and those who are considered “surplus populations” (Vargas 715). Vargas cites the ways in which discourses of pathology, such as Oscar Lewis’s sociological studies Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty utilize notions of ugliness, disgust, filth, and undesirability to assert Latinx communities as uncivilized and therefore unassimilable. Rather than insisting upon normative embodiment through heterosexual desires, cleanliness, and order, Delgado Lopera doubles down on the ways in which tropical environments symbolize ethnic origins and mark the aquatic Caribbean body as different, “fishlike,” and not human, and therefore refuses to sanitize queer migrant bodies. Motifs of sweat, pee, water, rain, as well as gustatory processes like digestion, blood, and vomit, work together in the novel to allegorize the process of immigration and narrate Francisca’s identity formation. In this way, Francisca’s refusal to sanitize ethnicity and gender variance demonstrates the ways in which sexuality is integral to the processes of identity negotiation that occur in immigration.
Delgado Lopera’s titular “fiebre tropical” registers a kind of sensuous mapping that captures embodied regionality and rejects national borders — in other words asking us to think about regional belonging rather than national belonging as a way to assert agency over migrant identity. Notions of belonging are registered through the lived experience of tropical rain and Miami’s humidity, which comes with constant, almost oppressive, full-body sweating. When discussing Bogota’s torrential, daily rain, Delgado Lopera writes that, “It’s like the sky had a fever…and it’s sweating all over us” (Delgado Lopera 114). By personifying the sky, they evoke the experience of illness, which takes up racist and xenophobic tropes of contamination. Historian Mae Ngai articulates the ways in which undocumented immigrant communities have been constructed as “illegitimate, criminal, and unassimilable” (Ngai 2). In xenophobic imaginaries, the United States is envisioned as a healthy body which must be protected from so-called “alien citizens,” bringing racialized pathogens, contaminants, and perversions. By describing Bogota’s rain as “tropical fever,” and Miami’s rain as a “tropical fever on acid,” Delgado Lopera insists upon continuity between the two Caribbean locales. While many Latinx literary scholars rightly note loss as primary trope of immigration narratives, Delgado Lopera’s Fiebre insists upon cultural continuity as depicted through sensuous, visceral, and embodied language. We might then see how “tropical fever on acid” might capture a kind of heightened ethnic identity one acquires when Latin American migrants arrive in the U.S. and enter the U.S. racial hierarchy.
Delgado Lopera’s notion of “fiebre tropical” therefore serves as a kind of origin point for Francisca’s Latinx identity, which is inclusive of queerness and gender variance. When discussing tropical rain, Francisca’s mother insists that it’s “God crying,” while her father says it’s “Dios pissing on us.” Meanwhile the narrator likens the rain to someone “gashing the ballooning gray sky with a giant knife and every drop of ocean rushed out” (Delgado Lopera 114). By conjuring the image of a knife, Delgado Lopera compares the rain to gushing blood, and in this way substitutes a similar image of a “pregnant sky” with the that of a “ballooning sky,” crafting a gender-neutral personification of God and sky. For her part, Francisca arrives at the conclusion that God, “cries, sweats, and pees [and we might add, bleeds] at the same time” (Delgado Lopera 114). Francisca’s Caribbean God therefore embodies surplus affect and bodily functions—emitting a deluge of liquids from all pores, orifices, and openings. This queer reframing of tropical rain makes room for abject and queer-coded subjectivities, such as those Vargas describes, within a distinctly Colombian-Caribbean-migrant experience.
As the novel progresses, Delgado Lopera builds upon the notion of water as an origin point for both ethnicity and sexuality simultaneously. Towards the end of the book, Francisca’s crush, Carmen, runs away to Colombia, and while she’s gone, Francisca explores her sexuality and attempts to fill the void by hooking up with Carmen’s ex-boyfriend, Wilson. Delgado Lopera writes:
One of those spooning rainy afternoons I felt the water coming again. Wilson passed out dormidito, his back to me. Dark neck similar to Carmen’s with a few freckles and tiny black hairs spiraling. I smiled, overtaken by the memory of her. Wanting to call it back, call back her smell. […] Playing with the hairs, I leaned my head to smell the neck, kiss it. The rain outside drumming on the window. Fierce. The rain carrying a certain sadness. Or maybe it was just me. It felt like I was swallowing the rain, like I couldn’t speak and was drowning. I was a vessel for the lluvia, a vessel for the fiebre tropical that wouldn’t stop. Wilson smelled like him. […] I gently kissed the back of his neck, swallowing the ocean inside. (Delgado Lopera 223)
Here, “the water” at the beginning of the passage refers both to the literal rain, and to the symbolic “water” as an expression of internal queer affect. The progression of the rainstorm illustrates Francisca’s attempts to turn her desires into something else, like an assimilation into normative sexuality. Delgado Lopera writes of this attempted assimilation as an abstraction of the body—Wilson’s body described as “the hairs” and “the neck.” But the “fierce” rain outside reflects the urgency of Francisca’s desires, and her inability to ignore reality, undercutting her efforts to substitute Wilson’s body for Carmen’s. Both the intensity of the rain, as well as the immediacy of Wilson’s “smell,” intervenes in the fantasy, leaving Francisca with the overwhelming reality of her queer desire. In religious language, Delgado Lopera writes that Francisca was “a vessel for the lluvia, a vessel for the fiebre tropical that wouldn’t stop,” implying that it was inescapable, and even divinely ordained, that she would be queer.
By connecting ocean water to tears, pee, blood, sweat, and queerness, Delgado Lopera conjures immigration discourse of departure, border crossing, and contamination. However, by linking immigration to bodily processes, they naturalize migration, likening the movement of bodies across the globe, and particularly within a regional ecosystem, to a process as ceaseless and inevitable as a salty tear leaving its duct, or the relief one finds from peeing after a long drink of water. The notion of “fiebre tropical” as an affective, situated, and embodied identity construct allows a Latinx migrant to relate sensuously to their environment, while resisting the dehumanizing fixity that accompanies Francisca’s entry into U.S. racial hierarchies.
I want to end with a bit about Delgado Lopera’s queer camp narration and Francisca’s sucia realness. Throughout the novel, they use various slang that emerges from queer ballroom culture, dominated by black and brown queer communities in major U.S. cities. When introducing the evangelical church, Delgado Lopera writes, “Category is: my first time at the evangelical Colombian church inside the Hyatt Hotel. Only the holiest, most respectable panela people walk this category” (Delgado Lopera 29). Of herself, Francisca confesses, “I didn’t want to admit it to myself or anyone but I was pure Soledad Realness, pure loneliness eating at my core” (Delgado Lopera 8). By engaging constructed categories and the concept of “Realness,” Delgado Lopera utilizes a queer, drag-inspired Latinx voice to frame Latinx identities as performative, socially maintained, and, as scholar Marlon M. Bailey writes of ball culture’s gender system, “malleable and mutable.” Campy suciedad, as we see in Fiebre, loosens Latinidad from scripts of irredeemable identiarian loss through migration, cultural betrayal through gender variance, or pressures to uphold palatable, pristine ways of being, which will always be unattainable for sucia subjectivities. Within the novel, the narrator consistently talks directly to us, the reader, and calls us “mi reina.” In this way, Delgado Lopera crafts a queer kinship, and lovingly reminds us that Latinx communities will always be marked as sexually deviant in all the best, sexiest, and most pleasureful ways. By claiming us as their own with every iteration of “mi reina,” we become the narrator’s kin, as they take us in as a fellow sucia, and sucia forever.