Object Lessons: Personal Adornment and Dissent in Multiethnic New York City

• In Event: Corporeal Dissent: The Flesh, Clothing & Tattoos

Abstract

The proposed paper examines clothing, tattoos, and jewelry bearing national iconography worn by Latino migrants who live in multiethnic neighborhoods in contemporary Queens, New York. Such visual culture is ubiquitous in the borough and reflects both the high number of migrants living in the area and the vast diversity of national groups that comprise its immigrant population. From a tiny ring encircling a finger in the Colombian tricolor to an enormous tattoo featuring the Paraguayan and Italian flags against the New York City skyline, migrants display, circulate, and customize national symbols in ways that are inventive and rich with meaning. Elaborating on the theme of the conference, I show how personal adornment can constitute quotidian forms of dissent by migrants against forces of assimilation, marginalization, and xenophobia. My presentation argues that migrants’ use of national emblems can express and foster both learning and unlearning of state-bound notions of citizenship.

Using material culture studies and ethnography, I ask what these pervasive yet overlooked objects can teach us about how resistance works in popular culture. Objects that proclaim connection to nations outside of the United States take on an additional edge in the context of the Trump administration’s nationalist, xenophobic and racist agenda. Indeed, his presidential campaign illustrated the ways that national symbols flatten difference, perpetuate violence, and reify oppressive subjectivities. While national iconography can reinforce notions of state sovereignty they also can subvert them. In the Queens neighborhoods of Woodside and Corona—seven miles from where Donald Trump grew up—“Hecho en Mexico” tattoos are a commonplace accessory for young men. Migrants fashion their appearance with symbols that express homesickness, defiance, national chauvinism, cosmopolitanism, solidarity, and rootedness. At a time when lay people and scholars are grappling with how the global, national, local, and personal interact, studying nationally inflected material culture helps elucidate how belonging is concretized in physical objects and signaled to others.

Bodily adornment entangles meanings that are both intimate and public. Migrants often unite national symbols with religious, sports, and commercial iconography (e.g. crucifixes in national colors, bracelets with insignias of national soccer teams). Such configurations are legible to different groups in ways that serve to parse communities of belonging and distinction. The combinatorial properties of this visual culture helps migrants position themselves in specific ways within their transnational communities, New York, the United States, and the globe. Nationally inflected adornment therefore facilitates complex self-fashioning that can push against oversimplified and oppressive formations of citizenship.

Most of the objects of my study participate in a form of cultural citizenship that leave unquestioned the role of the nation state as a legitimate rubric for categorizing people. These omnipresent artifacts nevertheless are integral to personal and social rituals that facilitate self-definition and resist racial and national reductionism and misrecognition. Some of the most radical uses of nationally inflected objects in Queens gesture beyond the nation state and allude to alternative and evolving formations of belonging. Using readymade national symbols, migrants in Queens elaborate, contest, and revise the meanings of citizenship.

Author

• Andrea Quintero, Yale University