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"I Love you Like Chicanos Love Morrissey": Affect, World-Making, and Latinidad

2019; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/asa.2019.0012

2381-4721

Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

"I Love you Like Chicanos Love Morrissey"Affect, World-Making, and Latinidad Eliza Rodriguez Gibson (bio) latina/o/x fans are a thing, apparently For the uninitiated, morrissey was the lead singer of the English rock band The Smiths, who were enormously successful in the UK (1982–1987). Singing songs shot through with alienation against the backdrop of Thatcherite England, morrissey cultivated an idiosyncratically glamorous image that was self-consciously awkward in its working-class androgyny: NHS glasses and hearing aid, an outsized Elvis pompadour, and flowery, flowing shirts were all part of his signature '80s look. After the band broke up, morrissey launched his solo career roughly six months later with enormous success. As his solo career developed, he began cultivating a more self-conscious embrace of rockabilly style and, in particular, drew heavily upon that masculine avatar of midcentury American teen angst, james dean. After his relocation to Los Angeles, morrissey acknowledged his wide Latina/o/x fanbase with a nod in the title of the+ video compilation and concert tour Oye Esteban in 1999. [End Page 113] It took close to forty years, but by the second decade of the twenty-first century, Latina/o/x Morrissey fans became a thing. In a recent scholarly article on masculinity among Latino fans of Morrissey, José Anguiano situates Latina/o/x fandom in Southern California historically and economically. He cites the influence of the major alternative rock Los Angeles-based commercial radio station KROQ (which frequently played The Smiths as well as Morrissey and other English rock/goth bands such as The Cure and Siouxsie and The Banshees, among many others) against the economic backdrop of the deindustrialization of Los Angeles, as key to circulating this music among Latina/o/xs in the Southland in the 1980s and early '90s. As Anguiano writes, "The destitute sounds of Thatcher era Manchester, England resonated with Chicano/Latino youth in the barrios and the suburbs of Los Angeles."1 Latina/o/xs, however, have been routinely ignored as a rock audience for as long as there has been a rock scene in Los Angeles. Anguiano notes that despite major contributions to American rock music (from Ritchie Valens onward) the erasure of Latina/o/xs is one of the cornerstones of both the music industry and rock journalism. However, despite—or perhaps because of—this lack of visibility, Chicana/o/xs and Latina/o/xs built a vibrant fan culture that operated at a grassroots level independently of corporate interests: at dance parties, karaoke nights, and night clubs that claimed Morrissey and The Smiths as their own. This fandom has grown to include Latina/o/x tribute bands such as the well-known Sweet and Tender Hooligans and their all-women counterpart, Sheilas Take a Bow, as well as other Morrissey-inspired musical collaborations such as Mariachi Manchester and the Mexico City-based Mexrissey.2 Given that Latina/o/xs are a significant part of the overall population in the greater LA area, it's no surprise that the city would feature a critical mass of Latina/o/x fans of Morrissey and his former band. And yet the very existence of such fans has long been an object of curiosity for the mainstream white commentatariat. Such commenters have approached the Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x fans of Morrissey as a familiar yet unfathomable phenomenon: how, they seem to wonder, did this become a thing? As Eoin Devereux, co-editor of Morrissey: Fandoms, Representations, and Identities, puts it, "Such media coverage has tended to focus on what it perceives as its cult-like, fanatical, and obsessive aspects rather than seeing it … as a really interesting example of fan creativity."3 Why has fan creativity become such an object of racially exotic curiosity? The sets of relationships between and among Latina/o/xs—dare I say, the forms of [End Page 114] love—that shape and take shape within the fan subculture they create are, I propose, as significant here as the love for Morrissey himself. At best, cultural commentators have searched for cultural or sociological reasons to explain why Latina/o/xs in Southern California could be so interested in music...