Over the last ten years, I have repeatedly returned to teaching Aurora Guerrero's lovely, lyrical 2012 feature film Mosquita y Mari in my undergraduate classes on queer and feminist aesthetics. I often teach it in a section on race, space, and sexuality, alongside readings by Deb Vargas, Richard Rodriguez, Karen Tongson, and Martin Manalansan. Most recently I paired the film with Jorge Cruz's (2022) analysis of the photographer Fabian Guerrero's 2018 “Queer Brown Ranchero” series, which is rooted in the specificity of US/Mexico border masculinities. To my mind, this is precisely what continues to give Mosquita y Mari enduring relevance even a decade after its release: its meticulous attention to place and its evocation of what queerness looks, feels, and sounds like in those minor spaces not typically imagined as sites of queer culture but rather as sites hostile to queer existence.When I first saw the film in 2012, I was in the midst of writing what would eventually become my 2018 book Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. The book considers how these aesthetic practices surface the “promiscuous intimacies” of occluded histories of colonialism, racism, and indigenous dispossession (Gopinath 2018: 7). At the time, I had already published a number of essays on what I called “queer regions”: subnational spaces that may seem out of time and out of place within a hetero- and homonormative national imaginary. Queer regions evince a different logic of gender and sexuality that is often at odds with those available within nationalist or even global discourses of gender and sexuality. Watching Mosquita y Mari in a small movie theater in downtown Manhattan—seen as an epicenter of gay life—I immediately understood the Los Angeles neighborhood of Huntington Park as depicted by Guerrero as a queer region: one of the many working-class, racialized, immigrant spaces that are seen as ex-centric to what Tongson (2011: 171) terms “the city's discourse of ‘urbanity,’” even as those who inhabit these spaces are indeed the “essential workers” that allow the city to function in the first place. Guerrero beautifully evokes the everyday modes of relationality through which queerness emerges in this off-center space “just west of East L.A.,” as she puts it (Erazo 2013).The film became an important touchstone in Unruly Visions: it allowed me to engage radically different racial formations, diasporic trajectories, and aesthetic genres through the rubric of queer regions. In the chapter that I eventually wrote, titled “Queer Disorientations, States of Suspension,” I situate the film alongside the photography of South Asian American artist Chitra Ganesh and the poetry of Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali. In so doing, I enact a practice of queer curation, which I understand as follows: My own project of queer curation . . . is . . . engaged with valuing that which has been deemed without value, but even more importantly, it deliberately stages ‘collisions and encounters’ between aesthetic practices that may seem discontinuous or unrelated . . . As such Unruly Visions is an act of queer curation that seeks to reveal not co-evalness or sameness but rather the co-implication and radical relationality of seemingly disparate racial formations, geographies, temporalities, and colonial and postcolonial histories of displacement and dwelling. (Gopinath 2018: 4)All three texts evoke minor spaces that are seen as not urbane enough for queer flourishing but that nevertheless possess their own logic of queerness. I use the notions of disorientation and suspension to name the ways in which these texts scramble and forestall what Lauren Berlant (2011: 3) terms “conventional good life fantasies.” Instead, they offer an alternative vision of what the good life may look like when it is unmoored from normative investments in the telos of repro-futurity, one that involves new equations and geometries of family, kinship, and domesticity.My chapter was particularly invested in showing how Mosquita y Mari dislodged dominant discourses of the family and kinship that have been so central to mainstream immigrant and gay rights discourses. In my critique of these discourses, I turned to the early “artivist” interventions of the Undocuqueer youth movement, specifically the “I Am Undocuqueer” poster series created by queer, undocumented Latinx artist Julio Salgado in 2012, the same year Mosquita y Mari was released. I was deeply appreciative of the brilliance of these interventions to challenge the heteronormativity of the mainstream immigrant rights movement and the homonormativity of the gay rights movement (focused at that moment on gay marriage and inclusion into the military). Yet I also wanted to turn our attention away from the declarative, agitprop mode of protest that ultimately reinscribed liberal individualism. Instead, in my reading of the film, I hoped to bring into focus the resolutely unspectacular, mundane, nonidentitarian modes through which queerness takes shape in minor spaces and on minor/minoritarian bodies.In the ten years since the film was made, the Obama-era neoliberal multiculturalism so pervasive in 2012 has given way to bald-faced authoritarianism, unabashed white supremacy, and the laying bare of the brutalities of racial capitalism. The litany of horrors is seemingly endless, numbingly familiar, and dizzying in scope: since 2012, we have seen border separations, “kids in cages,” countless mass shootings and everyday gun violence at the hands of police and vigilantes, untold numbers of COVID-19 deaths, and the terrifying intensification of global warming and climate disasters, not to mention the evaporation of basic civil rights protections and the right to bodily autonomy. These phenomena, of course, cause the greatest havoc in working-class communities of color like those of Huntington Park, CA, which constitute what Steven Thrasher (2022) terms “the viral underclass”: communities most vulnerable to public health crises because of deep-seated structural inequities. This is not to suggest that these violences were not endemic to an earlier moment of neoliberal multiculturalism. Rather, that earlier moment's deployment of naturalized discourses of family, kinship, and national belonging (“We are an American family . . . one nation, one people,” as Obama [2012] put it in his post-victory speech) rings particularly hollow and indeed fantastical in light of the events of the ensuing decade: cruel optimism indeed. Given this changed political landscape, Guerrero's intimately scaled portrait of adolescent Latinx female friendship, love, and desire is, to my mind, more necessary than ever. As I sought to make clear in my original reading of the film, Mosquita y Mari suggests other lines of flight and movement—states of suspension—that deviate from the relentless forward and upward momentum of good life fantasies: it never bought into these fantasies in the first place. The film makes starkly apparent the deadly toll neoliberal racial capitalism exacts on the geographic, bodily, and psychic landscapes of its working-class Latinx protagonists. Queer desire and relationality, in this context, serve as propulsive forces that open up other pathways of apprehending and being in the world.I want to end by engaging in another act of queer curation: one that places the film in relation to the work of Mexican-American artist Felipe Baeza. It only just dawned on me, upon revisiting Julio Salgado's 2012 “I Am Undocuqueer” series in preparation to write this piece, that Baeza, who is himself queer and undocumented, was in fact featured in one of Salgado's posters from that time. Baeza's recent series of paintings is titled Unruly Suspension and was exhibited at Maureen Paley in London in 2021 (see figs. 1–4). Baeza's series drew inspiration from my chapter on Mosquita y Mari in Unruly Visions, and I was honored to write copy for the exhibition. Thus, bringing Baeza's work to bear on my current revisiting of Mosquita y Mari closes the circle of influence and affective connections between the film, Baeza's artwork, Salgado's posters, and my own work.At the heart of Baeza's series Unruly Suspension is the body: abstracted, dismembered, remembered, obscured, suspended, floating, drowning, and sprouting wings, feathers, leaves, both human and celestial, entrapped and expansive. Unbound and unruly, bodies in Baeza's paintings are rendered translucent and almost marbled. Echoing Mosquita y Mari, the paintings ask what it means to inhabit a state of indeterminacy both spatially and temporally: that space “just west of East LA,” the space in between Mexico and the United States, childhood and adulthood, here and there, now and then. Even the color palette of moody, mottled, muted blues, purples, grays, and pinks, with the occasional shock of blood red, evoke the moment of transition from day to night. This is often the moment when crossings happen, over borders, fences, and bodies of water.As with Guerrero's film, we can understand Baeza's paintings as a response to the dominant binary through which US national citizenship and belonging are meted out, one that distinguishes “good” from “bad,” “deserving” from “undeserving” migrants. Baeza's delicate, layered collages, replete with painstaking detail that includes twine and yarn embroidered into the paper, repudiate this binary and instead suggest what it means to dwell in a state of suspension. Both Baeza and Guerrero intimate the ways in which one works the traps that one is in, in order to not simply survive and endure, but thrive and live fully. They do not romanticize the difficulty of this location: Mari's undocumented status is a grinding, corrosive element that makes all too apparent the impossibility of attaining the good life. Similarly, in Baeza's paintings, the violence, pain, and hardship of fugitivity are evident in the deliberate ambivalence and ambiguity of his images. Are these bodies landing or lifting off? Are they entrapped or expansive? Does the webbed netting that obscures their faces and torsos ensnare them, or enable them to soar? Rather than settling these questions, Baeza's Unruly Suspension and Guerrero's Mosquita y Mari instead present us with a capacious queer, migrant imaginary: one that demands not belonging or inclusion in the nation-state (whether in the United States or Mexico) but rather what Édouard Glissant (2006: 194) terms “the right to opacity”: the right to refuse the transparency and knowability required of racialized, migrant, minor, queer subjects that is the precondition of their regulation, surveillance, and capture.