Brown Neon

Gutiérrez’s] prose is fresh, it feels personal. . . . Her multifaceted mindscape comes through on every page.” —Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic “Thoughtfully tackles questions of gender, sexuality, and performance.” —K.W. Colyard, Bustle “Brown Neon is a work of Latinx mysticism. With beauty, and unmistakable care for person and place, Raquel Gutiérrez maps life’s butchest, sweetest, and saddest mysteries.” —Myriam Gurba “Brown Neon emerges as an instant foundational text, and Raquel Gutiérrez as a leading critic, witness, and visionary not only of the queer, brown Southwest, but our current American nightmare. Gutiérrez’s essays illuminate an otherwise ignored history of pivotal brown aesthetics that have changed the way some of us create and approach art. Beyond essential.” —Fernando A. Flores “Raquel Gutiérrez has crafted, in these inspired and astonishing essays, an unforgettably affecting voice that recounts parables of brown life in the arts. In narratives that describe the intergenerational landscape of queer cultural memory and self-ecologies of Latinx innovation within the current U.S. political economy, Gutiérrez dazzles. Sentences here excite and punctuate as they convey the historical losses and embodied gains comprising all those energies that animate artists, activists, and storytellers alike to ‘sing in similar and simultaneous registers of scarcity and plethora.’” —Roberto Tejada