Thinking and Teaching with Aurora Guerrero's Mosquita y Mari

Abstract

Aurora Guerrero is a California-based queer Chicana activist, writer, and filmmaker born in San Francisco's Mission District and currently residing in Southern California. Born to Mexican immigrant parents, she is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of the Arts. Her films include Pura Lengua (2005), Viernes Girl (2005), and Mosquita y Mari (2012). In the ten years since its release, Mosquita y Mari has become a film classic, making a significant impact on queer studies scholarship and in university courses in Latinx studies, gender and sexuality studies, and film and media studies.This dossier spotlights the impact of Guerrero's film—focused on the intimate bond between two fifteen-year-old Latinas growing up in the working-class immigrant Los Angeles neighborhood of Huntington Park—in the context of the classroom. Beginning with a conversation between Guerrero and Richard T. Rodríguez, the dossier includes four contributions by Gayatri Gopinath, Ariana Ruiz, Amalia Cabezas, and Larissa M. Mercado-Lopez that spotlight the pedagogical value of Mosquita y Mari for thinking about the complexities of sexuality, gender, class, race, and desire. Indeed, Guerrero's film—which refuses hard-and-fast categorizations of identity—proves generative for considering intimacy against the grain. In her compelling reading of Mosquita y Mari, Micaela Jamaica Díaz-Sánchez understands the film as operating in tandem with what Chicana lesbian theorist Emma Pérez (1999) calls “the decolonial imaginary.” In the film, Díaz-Sánchez (2017: 110) writes, “The decolonial signals a process and not a final location or destination. Guerrero participates in developing a decolonial aesthetic by resisting the logic of completion. She offers us images of desire that disarticulate heteronormative notions of intimacy.” And this is why Mosquita y Mari continues to matter a decade after its initial appearance.