Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead PDF

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024................................................................................... 1 Alternative Identiﬁcations................................................................................................................................................................. ∞ Lisa Marie Cacho Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024.............................................................................. Racialized Hauntings of the Devalued Dead The ghost is hungry and selﬁsh... and lost and bearing all the weight of the world it carries. And no one understands. —Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters This story is about a road that never ends. It begins with a car crash.—Rubén Martínez, in performance, April 22, 2000 O n March 24, 2000, my cousin Brandon Jesse Martinez died in a car accident in San Diego, California.∞ He was nineteen. When Brandon was alive, he frustrated teach- ers, counselors, employers, and even his friends and family. He took drugs sometimes, drank sometimes, and some- times slept all day. He liked low-rider car culture and Tupac Shakur. He was quick witted and too clever, thoughtful and impulsive, well intentioned and reckless. His teachers thought he was lazy and a troublemaker; he proved them right by never graduating high school. He lied on job ap- plications and didn’t pay his bills on time. He believed that one day he would go to prison even though he never planned to commit a criminal offense. He didn’t donate his free time to religious or social activism; instead he smoked, drank, and joked a lot. These were the memories Brandon left me, his parents, his sister, and the others who loved him. It made it hard to share stories about him that didn’t also characterize him as a ‘‘bad kid,’’ a ‘‘deviant subject,’’ or an ‘‘unproductive citizen.’’ 26 LISA MARIE CACHO Our conﬂicting memories and feelings about Brandon’s ‘‘deviance’’ evoked deeply felt tensions at the memorial service and the gatherings afterward as we struggled but failed to ascribe value to Brandon’s life and life choices. We were nostalgic for the days of his childhood, and we were Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 upset over losing his future and the person that he would never become. We shared our most recent memories of him as a teenager and young adult in carefully crafted fragments thick with anger and anguish. For some of us, his death became the pretext for teaching moral lessons: Don’t drink and drive. Go to school. Listen to your parents. Pray. These lessons attributed mean- ing and purpose to Brandon’s death. His death could be instructive for his friends and cousins because for those he left behind, ‘‘it was not too late.’’ But these lessons also taught us to devalue his life because they depended on understanding Brandon as an example never to emulate or imitate. His life was narrated as important because he provided us with a constructive model to evaluate, judge, and reject. The ﬁrst line of a poem written by his sister Trisha Martinez echoed loudly, persistently, and honestly in the space of his haunting: ‘‘You just don’t know how much he meant’’ (T. Martinez 2000). In many ways, we didn’t, because we didn’t know how to valorize the choices we warned him not to make or how to value the life we told him not to live. How could we explain to others and ourselves how much he meant when his most legible asset was his death? We couldn’t translate his value into language. We couldn’t talk about Brandon as valuable not only because he was marked as deviant, illegal, and criminal by his race and ethnicity but also because he did not perform masculinity in proper, respectable ways to redeem, reform, or counter his (racialized) deviancy. Even if we had attempted to circumvent the devalu- ing processes of race and gender by citing other readily recognizable signs and signiﬁers of value, such as legality, heteronormativity, American citizen- ship, higher education, afﬂuence, morality, and respectability, we still would not have had evidence to narrate him as a productive, worthy, and responsi- ble citizen. Ascribing (readily recognizable) value to the racialized devalued requires recuperating what registers as deviant and disreputable to rein- terpret those devalued beliefs, behaviors, and bodies as misrecognized ver- sions of normativity who deserve so much better. Value is ascribed through explicitly or implicitly disavowing relationships to the already devalued and disciplined categories of deviance and nonnormativity. Lindon Barrett theorized that value needs negativity; the ‘‘object’’ of RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 27 value needs an ‘‘other’’ of value as its ‘‘negative resource’’: ‘‘For value ‘nega- tivity is a resource,’ an essential resource. The negative, the expended, the excessive invariably form the ground of possibilities for value’’ (Barrett 1999, 19, 21). In other words, the act of ascribing legible, intelligible, and norma- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 tive value is inherently violent and relationally devaluing. To represent Brandon as the object of value, we would need to represent ourselves as the devalued other. On some level, the violence of Brandon’s death was per- versely and disconcertingly a ‘‘source of value’’ for us because it valorized the life choices that each of us made that he did not; it naturalized how and why he died while simultaneously reafﬁrming our social worth and societal value. His violent death validated the rightness of our choices and the righteousness of our behaviors: ‘‘The relativities of value [are] ratios of violence’’ (28). Because value is made intelligible relationally and violently, it makes sense to employ a comparative method to analyze the ‘‘not-value’’ of Bran- don’s short life and long haunting. A comparative analytic centers rela- tional, contingent, and conditional processes of devaluation, which makes it particularly useful for examining the ways in which interconnected pro- cesses of valuation, valorization, and devaluation (i.e., race, gender, sex- uality, class, nation, legality, etc.) work interdependently to reify value and relations of inequality as normative, natural, and obvious. Although it is informed by the differential devaluation of racialized groups, this approach does not necessarily entail an explicit comparison of two or more racial groups because relations of value are not always explicit. Oftentimes pro- cesses of differential devaluation work invisibly and implicitly, or they may be referenced abstractly (i.e., we are not ‘‘illegal aliens,’’ ‘‘terrorists,’’ or ‘‘criminals’’). On the other hand, because race is rarely the only and cer- tainly not a necessary signiﬁer for devaluation, sometimes a comparative analytic obliges us to examine the ways in which gender, sexuality, national- ity, citizenship, and class function to differentially devalue people within aggrieved groups as well as between and among them. In a sense, a compar- ative analytic assumes that in the United States, human value, legally univer- salized as normative, is made legible in relation to the deviant, the non- American, the nonnormative, and the recalcitrant: the legally repudiated others of U.S. value. Examining how value and its normative criteria are naturalized and universalized enables us to uncover and unsettle the heteropatriarchal, le- 28 LISA MARIE CACHO gal, and neoliberal investments that dominant and oppositional discourses share, which work to render the value of nonnormativity illegible. We could not disentangle the various intersecting, differential, contingent, and rela- tional processes of valuation and devaluation that made the value of our Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 lives and the choices we made to become valuable dependent on the deval- uation and violent invalidation of Brandon. Although he was devalued by legally protected norms and disciplined by many of us many times, we never disowned, abandoned, or rejected him—his death was too painful for us to realize that it also validated our social value. The empty space he left behind in each of us necessarily destabilized the value binaries and hier- archies that formed the foundations for each of our lives; still empty, the space of his absence still holds ruptural possibilities. He was profoundly valued, but we could not tell you why. Drinking Suspected When Brandon died in a car crash with his two friends, Vanvilay Khoun- borinh and William Christopher Jones, news media coverage of their acci- dent criminalized them and the racial masculinities that they each embod- ied. They became part of the preexisting news narrative that had devalued their lives when they were alive. As Isabel Molina Guzmán reminds us, ‘‘News media draw upon routine professional practices and socially avail- able and widely circulated narratives to tell their stories... stories that perform beyond the function of information’’ (Molina Guzmán 2005, 182). To apprehend how such widely circulated narratives about criminalized men of color function beyond disseminating information, it is productive to also examine the inundation of stories about white men and women in posi- tions of power. Ruby C. Tapia argues that such news stories are never incon- sequential because the media does not just honor the memory of public ﬁgures; it also passes on social values, ‘‘immortaliz[ing] ideologies of pa- triarchal capitalism and white supremacy.’’ Tapia encourages us to read the erasure of ‘‘non-spectacularized lives’’ in relation to or against ‘‘hypervisible whiteness, along with its haunting ﬁgures and social consequences’’ (2001, 263). These representations aid in constructing the ‘‘norms of gender, sex- uality, and domestic space’’ that Nayan Shah contends are necessary to prove one’s ‘‘worthiness’’ of political rights and social resources, which means these stories too form and inform the representational and narrative RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 29 violences that make discipline and punishment of the racialized unreformed seem natural and necessary (2001, 254). For these reasons, the erasure of Brandon’s, Vanvilay’s, and William Christopher’s nonspectacular lives and devalued deaths in print media Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 might best be understood through a comparison with the haunting ﬁgures and social consequences of white masculinity. By juxtaposing the San Diego Union-Tribune’s representations of Brandon’s accident alongside the fatal accident of the San Diego Padres’ fourth outﬁelder Michael Darr, we learn that the ‘‘facts’’ of people’s behaviors have little signiﬁcance for determining whose deaths are tragic and whose deaths are deserved. The detailed de- scriptions of these drunk-driving accidents provide us the shortcut ideolog- ical codes used in deciding which human lives are valuable and which are worth-less. In effect, the articles written about Michael Darr evoke public sympathy by representing his embodiment of straight white masculinity as socially valuable and by depicting his friends’ and family’s grief as a univer- sal experience, while the article about Brandon, Vanvilay, and William Christopher activated racial anxieties over criminalized youth and young men of color. On March 25, 2000, the San Diego Union-Tribune printed an article about Brandon’s car accident titled ‘‘Three Men Killed When Speeding Car Hits Trees; a Fourth Walks Away’’ and subtitled ‘‘Drinking Suspected; Auto Was Traveling Without Headlights.’’ Joe Hughes, a journalist who often reports on local crimes and drunk-driving accidents for the San Diego Union- Tribune, described Vanvilay’s driving as reckless and irresponsible joy riding, claiming that witnesses corroborated police ofﬁcers’ suspicions that the car was ‘‘speeding and may have been racing other cars’’ (J. Hughes 2000, B1). Vanvilay was driving Brandon’s 1984 Mustang, which was not a racing car and in fact was not even a car that ran very well, but in San Diego, ‘‘racing’’ alludes to a racialized car culture, predominately practiced by young Asian men in high school.≤ Along these lines, it seemed not to matter to police, witnesses, or Hughes whether or not the examiner’s report would reveal alcohol in Vanvilay’s blood; even if he was not legally intoxicated, he was represented as deﬁnitely recklessly driving (if not, then as if ) drunk. The accident was framed as inevitable and deserved through construing their illegal behaviors (underage drinking and driving) as a daily pattern, connot- ing both immorality and criminality: ‘‘In addition [to detectives learning that the four had been drinking that evening], alcoholic containers and 30 LISA MARIE CACHO mixing beverages were found in the car’s mangled remains’’ (J. Hughes 2000, B1). In contrast, even after the examiner’s report was completed on Michael Darr and police had conﬁrmed that his blood alcohol level was ‘‘.03 above Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 the legal limit [of.08],’’ the Highway Patrol ofﬁcer on duty still doubted that Darr’s accident would be considered a result of drunk driving: ‘‘Did alcohol play a role?... It may have. We described the cause as inattention. He was driving in the ﬂow of trafﬁc. He was not speeding. He was not weaving.’’≥ Although Darr was intoxicated and not wearing a seat belt, he was still portrayed as a good driver on the night of his fatal accident (‘‘not speeding’’ and ‘‘not weaving’’). The Padres’ second baseman Damian Jackson was also quoted to distance the drunk driver from drunk driving: ‘‘I can’t justify the amount of beer that he had,’’ Jackson said. ‘‘But I believe that alcohol was not a factor. ‘‘Mike had the tendency to pay attention to other things while he was driving, just like myself. He’d be changing a radio station, or putting cds in while driving. Carelessness like that I think had something to do with getting off track and trying to overcompensate.’’∂ Although Darr had been drinking and driving, the cause of his death was determined to be neither intoxication nor reckless driving but rather ‘‘inat- tention,’’ ‘‘carelessness,’’ or ‘‘trying to overcompensate.’’ Sports staff writers, rather than the local-crimes journalists of the Union- Tribune, reported Darr’s accident, which is important because sport has become a crucial site for resecuring, as Kyle W. Kusz contends, ‘‘the central and dominant cultural position of White masculinity.’’ Because white men are no longer perceived as athletically dominant, sport ‘‘enables the fabrica- tion of a crisis narrative about the precarious and vulnerable cultural posi- tion of White males’’ (Kusz 2001, 412). Baseball, in particular, as ‘‘America’s national pastime,’’ has been ‘‘associated with whiteness in the West for centuries’’ (Nowatzki 2002, 83). Darr’s death was thus also empathetically representative of the ‘‘tragic’’ position of white men in contemporary U.S. society.∑ When alive, Darr received little media attention because he was only a fourth outﬁelder, but in death he was transformed into a would-have-been- great ballplayer: RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 31 Darr, 25, was the Padres’ minor league Player of the Year in 1997 and again in 2000, when he shared the award with Jeremy Owens. He ran faster than the average ballplayer, threw farther and harder than the average outﬁelder and as a minor leaguer posted on-base and batting Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 averages well above the norm.∏ In death, Darr can be idealized. The various news articles about Darr’s life and death draw on testimonies by his trainer, manager, and colleagues (not his wife or family), which idealize him as well as the men he represents. As Dana Nelson has argued, ‘‘national manhood’’ as an imagined white frater- nity works best with ‘‘absent or dead men’’ (1998, 204). As a relatively young white athlete, Darr symbolizes (an innocent) white male victimization; his death activates these anxieties while his professional, fraternal relationships tell the shared story of loss: ‘‘[Manager Bruce] Bochy said he told the players: ‘Let’s make every day count, with our family, our friends and what we do on the ﬁeld. Do it for Mike’s sake.... We all should count our blessings. Every one of us. Really, it could have been any one of us.’’π In other words, Darr’s death not only mobilizes national manhood (‘‘Do it for Mike’s sake’’) but also mobilizes an imagined white fraternity over and against the absent bodies of women and the abject bodies of racialized others, such as Brandon, Vanvilay, and William Christopher.∫ This is most evident when we compare how the two accidents were represented to readers of the Union-Tribune. Krasovic often quoted the Padres, all of whom continually reference fraternal belonging: ‘‘Every one of us. Really, it could have been any one of us.’’ Staff writer Nick Canepa directly facilitated public identiﬁcation with the Padres, so that the reader ﬁguratively experiences Darr’s death as a member of the Padres fraternity: What can you say? You get the call early in the morning, just before heading over to the Padres complex to examine the rites of spring. It is a terrible, terrible thing. Darr was married (Natalie) and was the father of two sons. What can you say? You can say nothing. You can say you’re sorry. It never seems as if it’s enough. Because it isn’t enough.Ω Among other examples, the articles I have cited tell us that losing a loved one is a universal experience—‘‘a terrible, terrible thing’’ that happens to 32 LISA MARIE CACHO ‘‘every one of us.’’∞≠ But this supposedly universal experience is not invoked in the article about Brandon. In Hughes’s article, not only are ﬁrst- and second-person pronouns and referents never used, such as ‘‘we,’’ ‘‘you,’’ ‘‘everyone,’’ ‘‘our,’’ and ‘‘us,’’ but the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 terms employed to refer to Brandon and his friends detach them from their own personal connections to communities, friends, and families as if they were already merely another statistic: ‘‘the four had been drinking,’’ ‘‘three men died,’’ and a ‘‘fourth occupant walked.’’ Readers were not encouraged to empathize with the car crash victims or with those who survived them. On the other hand, the news articles about Michael Darr construct death as a universal experience. People of all colors and genders are encour- aged, if not expected, to identify with Darr’s family and empathize with his fraternity. We can all relate to losing a loved one, but the universal experi- ence of sudden loss and unexpected death is represented through a particu- lar and speciﬁc dead body—a body reconstructed and idealized to mobilize the interests and investments of an imagined white fraternity to resecure its cultural, political, social, and economic dominance (see Kusz 2001; Lipsitz 1997; Nelson 1998; and Wiegman 1999). Perhaps the most illustrative exam- ple of the (particular) Padres fraternity as representative of the (universal) American nation is when Bruce Bochy associated the tragedy of Darr’s death to the tragedies of September 11, 2001: ‘‘I think we experienced as a club something akin to what the nation felt after 9–11.’’∞∞ The social value of particular lives and speciﬁc deaths, like Michael Darr’s, continue to be immortalized through familial relations as well. When the Padres played their last game at Qualcomm Stadium on Septem- ber 28, 2003, players Phil Nevin and Gary Matthews Jr. took turns carrying Mike Darr Jr. onto the ﬁeld with the theme song from the movie Field of Dreams playing in the background. Fittingly, Field of Dreams is about the living ghosts of fathers and baseball players, not so subtly conjuring Darr Sr. to participate in the postgame ceremony. The sight of [Ken] Caminiti and Darr’s son on Nevin’s shoulder were also the moments that seemed to strike the strongest chord with the fans staying long into the evening. ‘‘The reaction of the fans was very special,’’ said Matthews. ‘‘They remember. I think they’ll always remember. It’s easier for me to deal with now. Seeing Junior is a positive thing. I don’t feel sad anymore.’’∞≤ RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 33 While ‘‘seeing Junior’’ felt healing for Matthews, what evoked tears from the fans was the sight of Darr Jr. growing up without a father. In this way, Darr Sr.’s social value is reproduced and passed on not just through, but also because of, his familial relations (Tapia 2001, 268). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 But not all familial relations can script social and human value onto the dead. It is telling that in the death and funeral notices, my aunt and uncle connected Brandon to the nationally sanctioned and sanctiﬁed institu- tions—family and sports—that ascribed social value to Michael Darr: ‘‘Be- loved by all who knew him, he left a large family and many friends behind. Brandon was active in youth sports and played baseball in Mira Mesa’’ (Martinez and Martinez 2000). Because racialized deviancy is rendered as gender and sexual distortion, many of our efforts to be included within the populations deemed worthy, deserving, and valuable are spent trying to conform to the norms of gender, sexuality, and domesticity considered ‘‘universally American’’ and crystal- lized as the ‘‘national family.’’ Sport afﬁliations and family relations are ideological codes for normative (socially valuable) masculinity, as evi- denced through the narrative strategies deployed by the sports writers of the Union-Tribune to rework Darr as an idealized victim of social change. But these codes work only incompletely for Brandon because ascribing societal value to the devalued dead requires narrating their lives through the same ideals, morals, and ethics that disciplined them while they were alive. Mourning without Words The San Diego Union-Tribune depicted deaths by drunk driving in very different ways, which determined whether or not the dead deserved to be mourned. Oftentimes ofﬁcial accounts of death and dying such as news media or police records do not acknowledge particular racialized tragedies as collective loss. Brandon’s, Vanvilay’s, and William Christopher’s deaths, in fact, were represented as not-losses and not-tragedies through the jour- nalist’s ‘‘performance of explicit non-caring’’ (Taylor 2003, 147). Public sym- pathy for them was not just not evoked but explicitly refused. This refusal makes it necessary to juxtapose the limited ofﬁcial archive of the written, recorded accounts of their deaths with the ephemeral performances of their friends’ and relatives’ mourning, explicit performances of love, care, and grief beyond words. 34 LISA MARIE CACHO Privileging ‘‘anecdotal and ephemeral evidence,’’ as José Muñoz explains, ‘‘grants entrance and access to those who have been locked out of ofﬁcial histories and, for that matter, ‘material reality.’ Evidence’s limit becomes clearly visible when we attempt to describe and imagine contemporary Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 identities that do not ﬁt into a single pre-established archive of evidence’’ (1996, 9). Brandon’s friends and relatives created what Ann Cvetkovich calls ‘‘an archive of feeling,’’ an archive constituted by the lived experiences of mourning and loss, ephemeral evidence that is now anecdotal (2003). It is an archive of the felt traces and sticky residue their deaths left behind in everyone’s chests. These feelings temporarily incarnated took various visual forms, a roadside memorial, T-shirts, and the wrecked car. When the story about the value of lives cannot be told, the visual can be an alternative mode of expression. It is akin to the way in which Karla Holloway examines performances of mourning as central to African American culture: ‘‘visual excess expressed a story that African America otherwise had difﬁculty illus- trating—that these were lives of importance and substance, or that these were individuals, no matter their failings or the degree to which their lives were quietly lived, who were loved’’ (2002, 181). Witnesses would be left with ﬂeeting imprints etched in their memories, raw material their uncon- scious might use for dreams. In this archive, value is ascribed to Brandon, Van, and Chris through their friends’ and relatives’ public mourning, their performances of explicit caring, profound pain, and deeply felt depression, desperation, and despair. I situate these ephemeral traces alongside the news article to illustrate how people ascribe value to the devalued through visual languages. While the ofﬁcial, limited archive of Brandon’s death functioned primarily to repudi- ate him, this archive of feeling documented a different way to measure value. Unlike the news articles, there was no attempt to make this grief universal, and in fact, the particular and speciﬁc were all that mattered. His name was Brandon. He died in this car on this road. Brandon’s, Van’s, and Chris’s family and friends created their own publics to witness their grief. By doing so, they resisted the erasure of their loved ones and made a statement: these were valuable young men, and they are missed. Their audiences were not given the opportunity to ask why. Soon after the crash, on the median of Calle Cristobal, friends and relatives erected a roadside memorial overﬂowing with ﬂowers, brightly lit by candles, and replete with personal messages, mementos, tributes, and RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 35 items the deceased might need, such as rosaries, oranges, water, boxes of their favorite cigarettes, and cans of menudo. Brandon’s sister, Trisha, at- tached her poem to the site’s tree, the memorial’s center, reminding us all of the need for alternative meaning making at the base or the core of the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 tragedy: you just don’t know. Noticeable from both sides of the road, the makeshift memorial mourned and remembered Brandon, Vanvilay, and William Christopher, but it also functioned to reactivate the scenario of their deaths, forcing roadside spectators to become witnesses and partici- pants (Taylor 2003, 32). According to Diana Taylor, a ‘‘scenario places spectators within its frame, implicating us in its ethics and politics’’ (2003, 33). This particular memorial was staged in such a way that pedestrians and drivers would have to actively and consciously not notice it. Because the memorial was located on the median of Calle Cristobal, you had to run across the road that claimed the young men’s lives to maintain it. It was not a safe crossing, but it protected the site from intentional and accidental vandalism. The young men’s best friend Shawn Essary, who had declined to go out with them on the night of the accident, created four hundred T-shirts and ﬁfty caps in their memory. In his design, three open roses are connected by thorny vines, symbols of love and death connected by the pointed pains of suffering, violence, and redemption. The shirts bear their pictures, birth- days, and death day, and all the clothing is boldly underscored by ‘‘R.I.P.’’ Worn in public by the young men’s family members and friends long after the funerals were over, the clothing unerased our racialized dead as our other/ed bodies all helped Brandon, Vanvilay, and William Christopher transgress another border, the one between the living and the dead. The roadside memorial and clothing were especially important means by which Brandon’s, Van’s, and Chris’s friends could participate directly in honoring their dead with dignity. Their friends had limited resources to express their grief, had no control over the mourning rituals or funeral preparations, and needed to negotiate the pain of losing three people all at once. Fusing three distinct religious and cultural backgrounds, they held their own ceremonies in the middle of the road: it happened here. They used their own bodies to display the communal tombstone that they would have written, walking around in silent protest: our chests hurt here where Brandon, Chris, and Van rest in peace. They carried their grief heavily on their backs, like living altars with so much symbolism: I got your back. 36 LISA MARIE CACHO Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 Front of T-shirt. Photograph by David Coyaca.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. The visual performance of explicit caring was also vital for my aunt and uncle, Christine and Jesse Martinez Jr., who made brief appearances on the news and gave speeches at high schools. Saving the car in its wrecked form, they towed it to, and displayed it on, several San Diego high school cam- puses. Their activism in encouraging teenagers not to drink and drive nar- rated Brandon’s death as illogical and preventable, as tragic and avoidable. RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 37 Rather than warning people of young men like Brandon, Van, and Chris, they cautioned young adults like Brandon, Van, and Chris. They recognized that life can be unforgiving, but those moments never have to be all-deter- mining. Directing their anger and heartache into anti-drinking-and-driving Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 activism ensured that Brandon’s death had a purpose. They refused to let him die in vain, speaking their story and leaving behind his name like an echo. Here is the car, and this was his name. At the next party their teenage audiences would attend, ﬂeeting imprints of a wrecked car and a parent’s tears might be resurrected, a reminder, a remainder, to hand over the keys. This archive of feeling evidences the human, familial, and social value of Brandon, Vanvilay, and William Christopher as their friends and family publicized their private pain. They were important alternative representa- tions that helped us to mourn and work against Brandon’s absolute erasure. But his picture on a T-shirt, a poem by his sister, the red box of cigarettes he smoked, and a lonely funeral card were not enough pieces of his lost life to reassemble into a proper eulogy to tell you why he mattered, to tell you why you lose out too because the life he led and the future he would have had were your losses too. I began to forget what his voice sounded like, and couldn’t remember the exact brown of his eyes. The emotive power of this archive of feeling was also limited precisely because it relied on feeling; it depended on grief and survival guilt. And it was all we had to ascribe value to Brandon—how much we hurt determined how much he was valued. Driven and Disciplined What we wanted to tell you was why Brandon was a valuable human being who did not deserve to die so young, and lacking a narrative that could convince others why Brandon mattered hurt us all. When he died, it seemed as if he did not hold the attitudes, values, desires, or work ethic that would eventually have enabled him to have a decent-paying job that could provide for a future wife and future children in a nice suburban neighborhood. This American dream framed how our middle-class mixed-race families grieved. Because our parents, aunts, and uncles wanted this dream and this future for their children, Brandon was narrated as a bad example to follow, but a good lesson to learn. Either we devalued his life by demonizing the same deviant qualities we missed and mourned, or we unduly disciplined our- selves for not diverting his delinquency early enough. 38 LISA MARIE CACHO We all wanted a better life for Brandon, but no one could guarantee it, so his death also became understood and talked about as everyone else’s private failure and the rational but humanly incomprehensible ‘‘will of God.’’∞≥ I found myself wanting to argue with my family that the ‘‘inev- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 itability’’ of Brandon’s ‘‘justiﬁable’’ death could not be attributed solely to his decisions, my aunt and uncle’s parenting, the personal moments we each failed him, or God’s will. Brandon could not be blamed completely for his decisions because there were so many options he never had and so many second chances that he was never given. How could Brandon, his parents, or his friends and other relatives be held accountable for making the wrong choices when the right opportunities never arose? Weren’t most resources withheld from Brandon, Vanvilay, and William Christopher? Economic restructuring and capital ﬂight eradicated the blue- collar jobs that these young men did not have to go to the next morning (see M. Davis 1990, 208; Castells 1991, 308; Miyoshi 1996, 255). Poorly funded schools in segregated communities provided them with inadequate educations to attend a four-year college.∞∂ Gang proﬁling marked them as potential criminals and gang members in the eyes of law enforcement (see Miller 1997; Escobar 1995; Rodríguez 2000). The widespread exploitation of both professional and unskilled immigrants makes it more proﬁtable for companies to hire immigrants than train the racialized working class (P. Martin 1994, 94; Reddy 2005). The long history of U.S. militarism and imperialism in Asia, Latin America, Mexico, and Africa makes it more proﬁtable for companies to relocate to countries economically devastated by structural adjustment policies because it is more proﬁtable to exploit, abuse, and dehumanize racialized women and children in the global South than it is to pay decent salaries, provide insurance, and follow health and safety regulations domestically (Bello 1994). Brandon, Vanvilay, and William Christopher were surplus labor, not needed for the time being but presumably always desperate enough to take a job should one have opened. What they did in the meantime was live with their parents and sleep late in the morning. They drank beer when everyone else was sleeping and talked about dreaming their way out of their respec- tive depressions, about how the day would come when their lives would be different. Socializing over a few beers can be imagined as either an innocent, harmless recreational activity (e.g., after a long day at work) or an indicator of criminality. Which one is evoked depends on the color of your skin, your RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 39 gender, and your age, your drinking company, where you live, where you drink, and whether or not you have a job to go to the next day. Brandon, Vanvilay, and William Christopher were a racially mixed group of unem- ployed and insecurely underemployed young men of color (Mexican Amer- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 ican, Laotian, and African American, respectively), who were fostering their own homosocial relationships with each other in a predominately middle- class suburban neighborhood. The recreational practices that they shared, as well as the individual work activities that they lacked, marked them as lazy and immoral, potentially criminal and always illegal. At the time that they died, their lives were not on the way to middle-class status, marriage, property ownership, or white-collar careers, and their (in)activities already ﬁt a media and law enforcement proﬁle that criminalizes racial masculini- ties—especially when embodied by Latino, African American, and South- east Asian young men (Gray 1995; Miller 1997; Escobar 1995; Rodríguez 2000; Tang 2000; R. Martinez 2002). Read and represented as irresponsible and reckless, their social practices are rendered deviant, understood as needing discipline by the military or punishment by and containment within the prison-industrial complex. Could he really be blamed for not making better decisions when the only institutions recruiting him were prison or the military?∞∑ I thought that if I explained the ways in which racialized economic hierarchies governed Brandon’s life, I could give my family a different story for why he died that did not center on his or their personal failures. I felt compelled to make sense of the ways in which structural conditions can constrain people’s lives. Brandon was an English-only-speaking American citizen; he was a high school dropout, who lived in a middle-class neighbor- hood and came from a middle-class family. No one in my family would have been convinced that he was destined for tragedy, and no one would have believed that his life choices were so limited that he could only choose between ‘‘bad’’ and ‘‘worse.’’ And because I didn’t have concrete evidence or cousinly intuition that Brandon wanted the options that would have made it possible for him to have higher education, job stability, and a decent salary, even I didn’t believe the story I spun for myself—though telling it made me feel better most of the time. In other moments, the subtext unsettled me because it suggested that some people are not afforded the opportunity to become better people or to make better decisions, implying that some people are fated to die young. I had to take away his agency to represent him 40 LISA MARIE CACHO as a victim manipulated by his own desires; I had to take away his decision to not make decisions and erase his talent for choosing non-options. Before Brandon died, the story of racial exclusion and racial exploitation always seemed so sensible. For me, its primary purpose was to evoke sym- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 pathy for the people that many Americans are quick to devalue. This is not at all an easy task though it seems as if it should be. To evoke public sympathy, we need to appeal to American norms and values, and doing so requires us to mitigate all the evidence that might suggest a person or population deserves devaluation if evaluated by those norms. This means re-presenting young men of color who lead unsympathetic lives (such as gang members, drug users, or risk takers) as latent law-abiding, hard-work- ing, family-oriented men, who have unfairly been excluded from the re- sources and opportunities that would lead them to make responsible, nor- mative choices.∞∏ And if we concede that economic opportunities will not necessarily integrate marginalized men of color into legal and moral econ- omies, we risk unintentionally validating conservative policies. In other words, the subtext is unsettling because for racial exclusion to work as a sympathetic narrative, it needs to draw on the neoliberal ideologies that work to legitimate global capitalism, naturalize inequality, and stigmatize nonnormativity. Roderick A. Ferguson argues that contemporary capital requires the people of color it recruits and renders redundant to transgress the norma- tive prescriptions of gender and sexuality that the state works to legally universalize (R. Ferguson 2004, 11–18). In the era of American neoliberal- ism, the state pathologizes or pities racially marked gender and sexual trans- gressions and celebrates racialized normativity exempliﬁed by U.S. multi- culturalism (Bascara 2006, xvi–xvii; J. Lee 2004, xix–xx). As neoliberal restructuring facilitates the continued integration of unevenly developed world economies, these deracialized and reracialized categories of devalua- tion are replicated on a global scale, which beneﬁts the wealthy elite of neoliberal states and worsens life for everyone else (Reddy 2005, 103–105; Harvey 2007, 9, 15–18, 31–35, 103–19, 159, 169–70; see also Bello 1994). As a result, people of color around the world have been dispossessed and dis- placed at alarming rates by the same neoliberal policies that have enabled the elite of the global South to join the world’s most wealthy. Jodi Melamed explains that the current contradictions of the global economy are managed by American neoliberalism’s inconsistent deployment of race to extend and RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 41 obscure global capitalism—a racial project she aptly terms ‘‘neoliberal mul- ticulturalism.’’ By ‘‘sutur[ing] ofﬁcial antiracism to state policy’’ (Melamed 2006, 16–17), neoliberal multiculturalism manages and disavows the con- tradiction of a world economic system built and sustained by racialized and Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 gendered violence and exploitation, on the one hand, and free market capi- talism as the symbolic epitome of racial and gendered equality, on the other. For instance, by using ‘‘the rhetoric of civil rights to portray ‘economic rights’ as the most fundamental civil right,’’ neoliberal multiculturalism enables the state ‘‘to advocate in an absolutist manner for deregulation, privatization, regulated ‘free markets,’ and other neoliberal measures as the only way to guarantee economic rights’’ (16–17).∞π Conﬂating economic rights with civil rights to justify U.S. intervention extends the ways in which property rights have been privileged in the United States over the human rights of the dispossessed and propertyless populations of color (Lowe 1996, 24–25; Hong 2006, 11, 34, 42, 48). Thus, in the United States, the struggle for civil rights could not really be disen- tangled from property rights (the right to buy a house anywhere as a sign of racial progress) or consumer rights (afﬁrming dignity through the right to eat at any restaurant in any seat).∞∫ According to Michel Foucault, this particularly American history created the context for the distinct character of American neoliberalism: ‘‘The generalization of the economic form of the market beyond monetary exchanges functions in American neo-liberal- ism as a principle of intelligibility and a principle of decipherment of social relations and individual behavior’’ (2008, 243).∞Ω In other words, American neoliberalism demands ‘‘an economic analysis of the non-economic’’ (246). As deciphered and interpreted through American neoliberalism, human value registers as human capital, and social worth is evaluated from the perspectives of ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘speculator’’ markets—we can attribute value by recounting a person’s useful and unique assets, talents, skills, and invest- ments, and we can speculate about a person’s future value: what can we expect this person to contribute to society in the future? When he died, Brandon’s value was entirely noneconomic. From what we knew, he didn’t have (and so he couldn’t capitalize on) a rare talent in high demand; his education was not a low-risk investment that promised a high return. In fact, he was expensive to maintain because he still lived at home, and without skills, experience, or education to improve his chances for a better job, even his future contributions were not worth speculation. Bran- 42 LISA MARIE CACHO don was disposable, redundant, and interchangeable; it did not matter that he embodied the privileged categories of neoliberal multiculturalism (as a biracial, American-born citizen). In this instance, being part of a category of privilege was an asset that offered access to the opportunity to choose to Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 become someone whom America would consider worth something. As both privileged and stigmatized,≤≠ Brandon was offered opportunity, but it came with obstacles. He was given the chance to become socially valuable— all he had to do was take ‘‘personal responsibility’’ for increasing his social worth and augmenting his human capital by making better (i.e., normative) choices. His value was illegible because he opted out. Dead Ends and Detours It would be untrue to Brandon to script him as a victim who was unable to access a better life, and in fact, privileging the American Dream and the ﬁnancial stability one needs to acquire it devalues the life he led and trivial- izes the choices he made. So I tried to reimagine how his choices were empowering. I imagined that it was a form of empowerment for him to perform Mexican American masculinity through hip-hop music, low-rider cars, and baggy clothes. Although sometimes his attitudes and his attire could be read as stereotypical, they could also be read as evidence of an ‘‘oppositional social identity’’ because youth of color often take their mod- els of racial authenticity from popular culture (Tatum 1997, 61). Performing racial masculinity could be read as a form of resistance if we read culture as political: ‘‘ ‘Politics’ must be grasped,’’ as Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd assert, ‘‘as always braided within ‘culture’ and cultural prac- tices’’ (Lowe and Lloyd 1997, 26). Robin D. G. Kelley insists that reserving the category of resistance for activists, organizations, and leaders underesti- mates and depreciates everyday forms of resistance, such as strategies to subtly subvert exploitation or artistic approaches to reclaim and ‘‘redeco- rate’’ public space. In fact, not only may we misread resistance as deviance, but in so doing we run the risk of patronizing youth, workers, and commu- nities as childishly disobedient, rather than consciously and deliberately deﬁant: If we are to make meaning of these kinds of actions rather than dismiss them as manifestations of immaturity, false consciousness, or primitive RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 43 rebellion, we must begin to dig beneath the surface of trade union pronouncements, political institutions, and organized social move- ments, deep into the daily lives, cultures, and communities which make the working classes so much more than people who work. (Kelley 1996, Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 3–4; see also Viesca 2004) Kelley admits that many minority cultural practices might be considered ‘‘ ‘alternative,’ rather than oppositional,’’ but although leisure activities are created for pleasure, they often become (or can be read as) political in relation to where and when they take place (Kelley 1996, 47, 166). Intention doesn’t always matter. Brandon didn’t need to be devoted to radically pro- gressive politics to be valued by the kinds of epistemologies that motivate antiracist, anticapitalist projects and scholarship. Yet like the story of racial exclusion, the narrative of resistance wasn’t quite the right analytical framework for making sense of Brandon’s life. I wasn’t convinced that his clothes, music, and recreational activities could be considered resistant or oppositional evidence for a latent political con- sciousness. I needed to imagine that he would have become, or at least could have become, a vital and valuable actor in the struggle for social justice. Although this perspective decriminalizes and depathologizes non- normative racial masculinities, it ascribed value to the potential for re- sistance that racial masculinities signiﬁed. In rereading Brandon’s actions and attitudes as evidence of his potential to become an anticapitalist, anti- racist ‘‘revolutionary-to-be,’’ value could only be attributed to him by ar- bitrarily divorcing the person he was from the imagined, idealized person he could have been. He might have become an activist although it seemed just as likely that he wouldn’t; as Viet Nguyen asserts, ‘‘The subject who refuses to be hailed by dominant ideology can also refuse to be hailed by resistant ideology’’ (Nguyen 2002, 157). To narrate Brandon as someone who should be valued, I had to recast who he was into someone he might never have become. Narratives of resistance sometimes betray an underlying assumption that acts of deﬁance will lead to (or at least support) progressive politics. For Saba Mahmood, reading resistance in this way can easily lead to a mis- reading of agency. From this perspective, agency means resisting ‘‘dominat- ing and subjectivating modes of power’’ because it is assumed that disrupt- ing and frustrating norms is an innate need that motivates everyone all the 44 LISA MARIE CACHO time (Mahmood 2005, 14). Mahmood asks us to think about whether ‘‘the category of resistance impose[s] a teleology of progressive politics... that makes it hard for us to see and understand forms of being and action that are not necessarily encapsulated by the narrative of subversion and re- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 inscription of norms’’ (9). Her questions and insights help me understand why calling Brandon resistant doesn’t feel right, either. If both dominant and oppositional discourses of value center norms—as either rules to live by or prescriptions for proper behavior to work against—then Brandon, who was nonnormative in many ways but intentionally oppositional to norms in hardly any, could only be evidence for someone else’s value. Because he was the ‘‘negative resource’’ of normativity and respectability, he also ascribed value to the activists and academics who protected and defended all the disillusioned members of disempowered communities. As an academic, I was not just an innocent bystander in these relational processes of valuation and valorization, sharing my time and resources with my disillusioned and disempowered cousin to steer him toward a future I imagined as more valuable than his present. Before we found out that Brandon would not graduate from high school, he asked me to tutor him. We met once a week for a couple of months, but though he was receiving As and Bs on the assignments we worked on together, his overall grades weren’t improving. I learned that this was because those were the only assignments he completed. I explained that the tutoring would work only if he did his homework every day, not just once a week with me. He apologized for wasting my time, and our tutoring sessions stopped. It never crossed my mind to ask him why he wanted tutoring. I assumed he wanted to graduate, but I think he just wanted to talk. He talked about pressures from his parents to graduate, get a good job, move out of the house, and become responsible. He talked about how he thought the students at his high school voluntarily racially segregated them- selves, and how he and his few close friends of different colors didn’t have a group to join, a place to ﬁt. He talked about how police were always follow- ing him, and he told me about how he felt left out and left behind when his parents became part of the middle class. We talked about wishing we knew our fathers’ languages because we felt there were things our grandparents wanted to tell us that English could not communicate. We talked about growing up with white mothers and growing out of internalized racism. We talked about West Coast rap music, the different car cultures of Mexicans RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 45 and Filipinos in Southern California, and the best place to buy Dickies. I talked about the future I wanted him to have: community college, univer- sities, student organizations like mecha (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), and ethnic studies classes. He listened. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 In the ﬁrst (and last) essay we worked on together, he told me he wanted to be a lifeguard. The assignment was to pick a career and research a path to achieve his goals. He had a list of questions he was supposed to answer: Why did you choose this occupation? What are the qualiﬁcations that you would need? What do you see yourself doing in ﬁfteen years? He decided he would like to be a lifeguard even though it was not an occupation that easily lends itself to becoming a career since lifeguarding is temporary, seasonal, and pays only up to $10,000 a year (B. Martinez 1997, 2). It was an interest- ing choice because, at least the way I saw it, being a lifeguard would not change his life all that much. He wouldn’t have much more disposable income than if he continued to work with his uncle (he’d probably have even less); he’d have to continue living at home, and the only upward mobility the job could offer was becoming a lifeguard II. I didn’t dissuade him directly, but I did try to encourage him to think about other options— particularly ones that needed higher education. He reluctantly obliged me because he thought the teacher would like to read about that too, but he also resisted, probably because going to college didn’t sound appealing. He wrote, ‘‘After lifeguarding there are several oc- cupations that you could take up such as a paramedic, swimming coach, or a ski patroller, according to Vocational Biographies. That’s not much to look forward to, but they are not the only options to take. You may have some other skills, so that’s where a good education comes in for landing a better job’’ (B. Martinez 1997, 4). He did not specify those better jobs, possibly because they didn’t look better to him. He chose a career that was not a career, and to climb the socioeconomic ladder, he had to drop out of his dreams and go back to school. This is why contextualizing Brandon’s life choices through his exclusion from decent-paying blue-collar work was inadequate; it implies that access to good-paying jobs or higher education would have enabled him to make different choices. But as his essay on the future he would never have sug- gests, he didn’t really want a nuclear family with a house in the suburbs. He might not have taken one of those decent-paying blue-collar jobs even if they were still available. At the same time, Brandon constructed himself not 46 LISA MARIE CACHO only as someone who was not productive but also as someone who was not useless: ‘‘I am not quite sure but when you save a person’s life I bet it makes you feel very good inside that is something I could see myself doing. Plus just being around the water and people all the time seems like something Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 good for me’’ (B. Martinez 1997, 2). He didn’t want to work to pull himself up a corporate ladder; he wasn’t interested in raises or promotions. He wanted to spend his time on the beach, feeling good on the inside if some- one needed help, feeling good on the outside when everyone was safe. He wanted to be accountable to everyone and responsible for everyone. There’s nothing necessarily revolutionary in wanting to live this life, but choosing a seasonal career that would ensure downward mobility is not quite normative, either. He had a talent for choosing life’s non-options, and because he often didn’t make decisions according to American neoliberal logic, his decisions were usually illogical or unintelligible (but not neces- sarily wrong) when evaluated through a cost-beneﬁt or supply-and-demand analysis. He seemed to think of himself as someone who didn’t ﬁt into the life he had inherited, and while his efforts to redesign, evade, and defer the American dream might not provide us with blueprints for redistributing resources, perhaps they can help us to think about the importance of redistributing dignity. A Politics of Deviance Sometimes his age makes it difﬁcult to ask the questions I have been asking because who he was at nineteen is an unreliable predictor for the adult he might have been at age thirty-eight or sixty-two. But the expectations for the adult he was supposed to become disciplined him for most of his life and provided a way to measure his (real and speculative) value after he died—as if ‘‘ ‘living’ is something to be achieved and not experienced’’ (Hol- land 2000, 16). So much of life and its supposedly seminal moments is organized according to the universalized expectations of the family and its gendered roles in naturalizing private property (buying your ﬁrst home), wealth accumulation (passing down inheritance), and the pleasures of do- mestic consumption (planning weddings and baby showers)—all of which repackage reproductive labor as the unpaid but rewarding labor of love. The milestones of heteronormative and homonormative life that Brandon would never be able to experience rendered his life tragic. He would not RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 47 have children to carry on his family’s name, and his death deprived his parents and sister of their own signiﬁcant life moments with him. Our sadness sometimes even precluded our capacities to mourn his passing according to the life experiences he might have wanted for himself, which Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 may not have included ones we imagined for him. We needed to disconnect the life he experienced from the life he had been failing to achieve. It is difﬁcult to value Brandon by the quality of his life experiences when time and space are organized through heteronormativity and dictated by capital accumulation,≤∞ but by situating him in a ‘‘queer time and place,’’ we can ﬁnd ways of being and frameworks for valuing that ‘‘challenge conven- tional logics of development, maturity, adulthood, and responsibility’’ (Hal- berstam 2005, 13). As Judith Halberstam argues, ‘‘Queer subcultures pro- duce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely birth, marriage, reproduc- tion, and death’’ (2005, 2). Denaturalizing (hetero)normative time, space, and the life achievements they universalize enables us to extend value to— or at least suspend judgment of—all kinds of people who live outside the logics of capital accumulation and bourgeois reproduction. All kinds of people, especially in postmodernity, will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time as well as on the logics of labor and production. By doing so, they also live outside the logic of capital accumulation: here we could consider ravers, club kids, hiv-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed. Perhaps such people could productively be called ‘‘queer subjects’’ in terms of the ways they live (deliberately, accidentally, or of necessity) during the hours when others sleep and in the spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that others have abandoned, and in terms of the ways they might work in the domains that other people assign to privacy and family. (Halberstam 2005, 10) In some ways, Brandon lived in a ‘‘queer time and place,’’ and in others, he might even be considered a ‘‘queer subject’’ (Holland 2000, 178–80). Although his experiences weren’t necessarily comparable or similar to queers of color, a queer of color analysis ‘‘makes some sense’’ of his life without condemning or celebrating who he was or could have been.≤≤ Queer of color analysis, as deﬁned by Ferguson, extends the ‘‘theorized 48 LISA MARIE CACHO intersections’’ of women of color feminism ‘‘by investigating how intersect- ing racial, gender, and sexual practices antagonize and/or conspire with the normative investments of nation-states and capital’’ (R. Ferguson 2004, 4). Put another way, both women of color feminism and queer of color critique Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 stress that sometimes ‘‘it may be necessary to overcome resistance in order to achieve resistance’’ (Pile 1997, 24). For Brandon, the failure to meet heteronormative and neoliberal expectations (and his reluctance to even try to attain them) was compounded by his racial background as Chicano/ Mexican American because he was not just a lazy kid without a high school diploma who drank too much and lived off his parents. When Brandon deﬁed normative investments in heteropatriarchy and American enterprise, he gave credence to racial stereotypes, which is partly why he also could not be fully valued through a politics of racial normativity.≤≥ Brandon was always confusing me in ways I couldn’t name. Trying to ﬁgure out the motives for his choices often eluded me because his actions and his attitudes were simultaneously neither complicit nor resistant as well as both at the same time. Imposing a normative framework onto his aspira- tions made his goals and desires difﬁcult to decipher because he wanted to be unremarkable and live his life a little on the lazy side. He was only lackadaisically deﬁant, but we all read him as rebellious because he kept diligently deferring or sabotaging what was supposed to be his American dream. It was as if he followed a logic all his own, and maybe that was the tutoring lesson I was supposed to learn. Maybe I failed because I looked in all the wrong places to ﬁnd methods, narratives, and strategies for ascribing social worth to his personhood, trying to make him ﬁt into my overre- searched reasons and rationales rather than making an effort to remember what he might have been trying to teach me. I think he wanted to teach me how to make sense of what Cathy Cohen terms ‘‘a politics of deviance’’ (Cohen 2004, 3–4). A politics of deviance would neither pathologize deviance nor focus most of its energies on trying to rationalize why people choose deviant practice over proper behavior. Instead we would read nonnormative activities and attitudes as forms of ‘‘deﬁnitional power’’ that have the potential to help us rethink how value is deﬁned, parceled out, and withheld (38). Both Cohen and Kelley resist spinning a normative narrative that ascribing value to the devalued often demands; in different ways, they give us a language of value that translates ‘‘the cultural world beneath the bottom’’ into lived practices and living RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 49 alternatives to American norms: ‘‘Ironically, through these attempts to ﬁnd autonomy, these individuals, with relatively little access to dominant power, not only counter or challenge the presiding normative order with regard to family, sex, and desire, but also create new or counter normative frame- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 works by which to judge behavior’’ (Kelley 1996, 12; Cohen 2004, 30).≤∂ Of course, sometimes deﬁant or deviant practices critique the rules of normal- ity (purposely or inadvertently) but don’t necessarily break them; they might direct us toward necessarily nonnormative criteria for recognizing social worth even if they don’t model or theorize alternative ways of living. Brandon’s unintelligible ethic of deviance might not be unapologetically normative or radically transformative, but it is deﬁnitely a way of living that interrogates and elucidates the ways in which dominant understandings of morality and ethicality may sometimes mitigate oppositional politics and scholarship. When we take Brandon and others like him seriously, we are expected to suspend judgment of those who choose to drive down fatal roads because there is value as well as fear in taking risks and living differ- ently—even if it means actively and accidentally leaving the rest of us behind, empty and haunted. As Rubén Martínez reminds us, ‘‘The road may kill us in the end, but it’s also the only way to get to where we’re going.’’≤∑ Notes I would like to thank Trisha Martinez for her willingness to share not only materials for this article but also her feelings and insights about her grief and that of others. I also thank Christine and Jesse Martinez for the many ways in which they inspired this project. I am especially grateful to the other contributors to this book for their careful readings of my chapter, in particular Jodi Melamed and Grace Hong. I owe much appreciation to many conversations with W. David Coyoca, Helen H. Jun, Fiona I. B. Ngô, Isabel Molina Guzmán, Eileen Díaz McConnell, Richard T. Rodríguez, George Lipsitz, Yen Espiritu, Lisa Lowe, Ruby C. Tapia, Gregory Lobo, Kent Ono, Angharad Valdivia, Chandan Reddy, and Roderick Ferguson. 1 ‘‘Wreck in the Road’’ is the title of a song written by Rubén Martínez, which he performed with Los Illegals on April 22, 2000, at Expresso Mi Cultura in Los Angeles. Text provided by author; see also Rubén Martínez 2001. 2 Although Calle Cristobal is not far from a possible racing strip (the roads changed weekly or daily), American cars like Brandon’s 1984 Mustang—big, clunky, old, and slow—were not part of this particular racing culture, which raced late-model 50 LISA MARIE CACHO Hondas and Toyotas, most of which were modiﬁed to maximize speed and perfor- mance. Vanvilay, however, as a young Asian man, ﬁt the proﬁle of a racer, though the car he was driving did not. 3 Arizona Highway Patrolman Frank Valenzuela, quoted in Tom Krasovic, ‘‘Darr Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 Legally Intoxicated, Says Examiner’s Report,’’ San Diego Union-Tribune, March 14, 2002, D1. 4 Damian Jackson, quoted in Krasovic, ‘‘Darr Legally Intoxicated,’’ D1. 5 The media usually represents athletes of color in less sympathetic ways. See, e.g., Cole and Mobley 2005. For a speciﬁc examination of the history of Latinos in baseball, including how Latino ballplayers have been racialized, see Burgos 2002; and Regalado 2002. 6 Tom Krasovic, ‘‘Padres Crushed by Loss of Darr; Teammates Speak of Person- ality, Potential,’’ San Diego Union-Tribune, February 16, 2002, D1. 7 Bruce Bochy, manager of the San Diego Padres, quoted in Tom Krasovic, ‘‘Bochy Hopes Team Can Learn from Tragedy,’’ San Diego Union-Tribune, February 23, 2002, D3. 8 Because Dana Nelson’s analyses focus on ‘‘the era of ‘universal’ white manhood suffrage’’ (1780s–1850s), the imagined white fraternity she examines literally re- fers to white men (1998, xi). The way in which ‘‘national manhood’’ would still be considered an imagined white fraternity in the contemporary period is probably best understood by deﬁning whiteness as ‘‘a possessive investment in whiteness.’’ George Lipsitz deﬁnes the possessive investment in whiteness as ‘‘a social struc- ture that gives value to whiteness and offers rewards for racism’’; a possessive investment in whiteness reinforces and reiﬁes racial inequalities but is not neces- sarily practiced and possessed only by white people (1997, viii). 9 Nick Canepa, ‘‘Padres Crushed by Loss of Darr; Words Just Can’t Soften His Passing,’’ San Diego Union-Tribune, February 16, 2002, D1. 10 Krasovic, ‘‘Darr Legally Intoxicated,’’ ‘‘Padres Crushed by Loss of Darr,’’ ‘‘Bochy Hopes Team Can Learn from Tragedy.’’ Tom Krasovic, ‘‘Darr Tragedy Leaves Team Trying to Go On,’’ San Diego Union-Tribune, February 17, 2002, C1. Bill Center, ‘‘On a Swing and a Miss, Padres End It at the Q; Rockies Stage Rally to Wrap up an Era,’’ San Diego Union-Tribune, September 29, 2003, E1. 11 Bruce Bochy, quoted in Bill Center, ‘‘Despite Tragedy, Positives Found; Darr’s Death Put in the Past; Team Moves Forward,’’ San Diego Union-Tribune, April 1, 2002, C5. 12 Center, ‘‘On a Swing and a Miss.’’ 13 For our families, becoming middle-class would not automatically be inherited. Because people of color were subject to redlining and restrictive covenants and were excluded from the programs that enabled wealth accumulation during the New Deal and afterward, many middle-class families of color in the contempo- rary era are unstable (Massey and Denton 1993, 36–37, 51–58; Oliver and Shapiro 1997, 16–18, 39–41, 87–89; Lipsitz 1997, 5–18; McConnell 2005, 22–30, 36–41). Many lack signiﬁcant assets to pass down intergenerationally, and racial discrimi- RACIALIZED HAUNTINGS 51 nation in education and the workforce also makes it difﬁcult to pass down oc- cupational mobility (Oliver and Shapiro 1997, 90, 157–58). For an analysis of the ways in which housing policies and homeownership affect Latinos in the contem- porary era, see McConnell 2005. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 14 For an analysis of particular hardships of urban areas, see J. Lee 2004; Kozol 1992; Lo 1995; Orﬁeld, Eaton, and Jones 1997. 15 According to Jorge Mariscal, ‘‘The Army Times reported that ‘Hispanics’ con- stituted 22 percent of the military recruiting ‘market,’ almost double their num- bers in the population’’ (2009, 3). In a separate article, Mariscal explains that ‘‘military service does not close the economic gaps separating the majority of Latinos from the rest of society but potentially widens them’’ because military job training such as ‘‘small arms expertise and truck driving’’ does not translate into well-paying jobs within the civilian economy (2003). African American men and women constitute an overwhelming 22.4 percent of the military while constitut- ing only 12.41 percent of the civilian population between the ages of eighteen and forty-four (Ofﬁce of the Assistant Secretary of Defense 2004, appendix B-25). Latinas/os are especially overrepresented in potential combat positions; for in- stance, over a quarter of Latinas/os in the army and over 20 percent of Latinas/os in the marines serve in the infantry (B-30). In 2008, Latinas/os constituted 39 percent of the incarcerated population in California prisons (California Depart- ment of Corrections 2008). 16 Of course, these are not mutually exclusive; for instance, some men of color might support their partners or children through illegal economies. See Cohen 2004, 36. 17 I am quoting Melamed’s analysis of the Bush administration’s 2006 National Security Strategy. 18 On consumerism and citizenship, see Hong 2006, 88–91. 19 Foucault explains that ‘‘liberal type claims, and essentially economic claims’’ in the United States ‘‘were precisely the historical starting point for the formation of American independence’’ (2008, 217). Unlike Germany and France, in America, ‘‘The demand for liberalism found[ed] the state rather than the state limiting itself through liberalism’’ (217). 20 Melamed explains that privilege and stigma no longer neatly correspond to racial categories: ‘‘Neoliberal multiculturalism breaks with an older racism’s reliance on phenotype to innovate new ways of ﬁxing human capacities to naturalize inequal- ity. The new racism deploys economic, ideological, cultural, and religious distinc- tions to produce lesser personhoods, laying these new categories of privilege and stigma across conventional racial categories, fracturing them into differential status groups’’ (2006, 14). 21 As Halberstam explains, ‘‘Queer temporality disrupts the normative narratives of time that form the base of nearly every deﬁnition of the human in almost all our modes of understanding’’ (2005, 152). 22 I am referencing Hong’s deﬁnition of women of color feminist practice as a ‘‘reading practice’’ and a ‘‘methodology for comparative analysis’’ (2000, xi, xvi). 52 LISA MARIE CACHO Women of color feminist practice emerges to ‘‘make sense of that which is pa- thologized or rendered invisible by the epistemologies of nationalism’’ (xii). 23 See Rodríguez 2009 for an insightful analysis of family and nationalism. See Richie 1996 for an excellent analysis of the impossibility of heteropatriarchal Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/653115/9780822394075-002.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 08 August 2024 investments in poor communities of color. 24 Unlike Kelley, Cohen speciﬁcally does not deﬁne most acts of deﬁance and deviance as evidence of resistance because she reserves ‘‘resistance’’ for acts with political intent (2004, 39). 25 Rubén Martínez, performance with Los Illegals on April 22, 2000, Expresso Mi Cultura, Los Angeles.

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