Obscuritasand the Closet: Queer Neobaroque in Mexico

Abstract

During the Baroque period, Luis De GÓngora y Argote (1561–1627) wrote the first Spanish-language closeted literature. Some three hundred years later, the challenging originality of his closet verse, openly studied and appreciated by a cultured, intellectual elite, played a pivotal role in the development of homosexual literature in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde movements of Spain and Latin America. This essay will briefly explore how twentieth-century Mexican avant-garde writers expressed the closet using baroque models. The thesis is that the rhetorical strategies ofobscuritasprovided Góngora an ideal instrument for representing the closet, which in literature is defined as a symbolic space that allows writers to represent and readers to recognize homosexuality in a heterosexual context. The pertinentOEDdefinition ofclosetas an adjective reads, “secret, covert, used esp. with reference to homosexuality” (“Closet”). This recognized use ofobscuritasis validated further in the observations of the Peruvian colonial writer Espinosa Medrano, one of Góngora's seventeenth-century commentators, who epitomizes the consolidation of baroque aesthetics in Hispanic America by the criollo elite. The final chapter in this tour of the baroque closet will examine how the Mexican avant-garde became aware ofobscuritasthrough Federico García Lorca's Gongorine lectures and poetry.