Vato Love: Feeling Chicano Otherwise in Dino Dinco and Joe Jimenez’s El Abuelo

• In Event: Visual Noise, Vato Love, Chicano Heels: Distortions of Queer Latine/Chicane Aesthetic at the Edge

Abstract

Dino Dinco’s short film El Abuelo features San Antonio-based poet Joe Jimenez and his eponymous poem “El Abuelo.” The film opens with a panning shot of a brown dresser with a plain white shirt and black pants hanging on the dresser’s knobs. The camera then guides the viewer to the pair of white Nike Cortez on the floor as Jimenez enters the frame. Commissioned by the 2008 London Fashion in Film Festival, El Abuelo offers a capsule of seemingly traditional Chicano style, aesthetics, and affect through shots of Jiménez riding a lowrider bicycle, writing, and ironing his clothes. Yet it is the voice-over of Jimenez reciting “El Abuelo’s” verses, that subverts the symbolic and material links between hetero-patriarchy and Chicano style and affect. As a likely homage to Joey Terrill’s magazine, Jiménez’s “El Abuelo” is an excerpt from a larger text/performance piece titled, Homeboy Beautiful (and Other Things I’ve Nearly Forgotten But Am Throwing Punches Not to Forget). Jiménez’s poetic voice as the title suggests, revels in the struggle to retain queer “vato” memories of his first vato love within the bonds of the Chicano family. Echoing José Esteban Muñoz’s theorizing of Latina/o affect, I read Dinco’s interpretation and Jimenez’s “El Abuelo” as nuanced disidentifications with U.S. hetero-normative whiteness, mainstream gay culture, as well as traditional takes on Chicano aesthetics and affect. I contend that Dinco and Jimenez’s queer vato visual poetics of love and desire excavate and recover a queer Chicanx vato collective memory that triggers a historical defiance of Chicano heteromasculinity.

Author

• Liliana C Gonzalez, California State University-Northridge