José Esteban Muñoz defines disidentification as “a mode of recycling or re-forming an object that has already been invested with powerful energy” that is practiced by BIPOC queers.1 He states that “to perform queerness is to constantly disidentify, to constantly find oneself thriving on sites where meaning does not properly ‘line up,’” which can double up in its performance for the queer of color who is doubly marginalized.2
I am currently in the process of working through a deeply colonial, racist, and violent archive of early cinema that constitutes the earliest images and narratives made in and about Puerto Rico. As an archivist and historian, I grapple with why these early films matter if they are so degrading and difficult to reconcile with what I understand to be Puerto Rican culture. As a queer essay filmmaker, I view these films as an opportunity to process and practice disidentification.
I am the love child of an affair, born to two Puerto Rican parents who met on a military base in South Carolina. One of them decided to move back to Puerto Rico, and the other one moved to Florida. Due to the fractured nature of this union, both of them agreed to ship me off to the other for six months of the year. Since the age of six, I have split half my life between these two places. Growing up isolated from both families and both cultures, I recognize that I constantly performed disidentification. My queerness felt like the only friend I had, and pop culture, films, and television was the stage on which I could regurgitate all the confusion, melancholia, and isolation I felt in my lived experience.
My bi-cultural and queer subjectivity forms the backbone of Desidentificación. I started with collecting the earliest surviving films made about or in Puerto Rico: Romance tropical (1934), Mr. Moto in Danger Island (1939), Ship Ahoy (1942), The Man with My Face (1951), Los peloteros (1951), El santero (1956), ¿Qué opina la mujer? (1957), El secreto (1958), Machete (1958), Counterplot (1959), Fiends of Dope Island (1961), Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965), and La botija (1976). These films are a mixture of Hollywood narratives, independent “native” Puerto Rican films, and US-sponsored Puerto Rican government films made by the División de Educación de la Comunidad (DIVEDCO).
Throughout this accumulation and analysis process, I encountered three archetypes: The Archivist, La Borinqueña, and The Hollywood Starlet. My bi-cultural, queer subjectivity embodies these archetypes throughout Desidentificación. The essay film starts out as a standard historical video essay, explaining the context of the earliest images made about or in Puerto Rico. As the film continues, I perform disidentification through the intersection and embodiments of all three archetypes, destabilizing the form of the film itself as cinematic images are spliced with performance and cinematographic images I recorded myself of Puerto Rico.
Muñoz asserts radical possibilities for freedom through disidentification in order to manage and negotiate “historical trauma and systemic violence.”3 He emphasizes that disidentificatory performances are “enactments of power in the face of repressive truth regimes and the state power apparatus.”4 The world, and how it can be shaped, is at stake through disidentification. Desidentificación is an exploration and a reclamation of narratives that is disruptive, incomplete, and corrosive. The film re-frames ways to think about the earliest surviving images of Puerto Rico while subjectively narrativizing how the colonial archive splits the writing of this cinematic history across generations and identities.
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Endnotes
- José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 39.
- Ibid., 78.
- Ibid., 161.
- Ibid., 199.
Maillim Santiago