Brown Neon

Essays by Raquel Gutiérrez

June 7, 2022 • 5 x 7.75 • 232 pages • 978-1-56689-637-5

A meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders. 

Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez’s debut essay collection Brown Neon gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds. Whether contemplating the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object, highlighting the feminist wounding and transphobic apparitions haunting the multi-generational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutiérrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity, and citizenship with curiosity and nuance.

About the Author

Raquel Gutiérrez is an arts critic, writer, poet, and educator. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Gutiérrez credits the queer and feminist diy, post-punk zine culture of the 1990s, plus Los Angeles County and Getty paid arts internships, for introducing her/them to the various vibrant art and music scenes and communities throughout Southern California. Gutiérrez is a 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism and a 2017 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She is/They are faculty for Oregon State University–Cascades’ Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Gutiérrez calls Tucson, Arizona, home.

Praise for Brown Neon

Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Winner of the 2023 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
The New Yorker, “Best Books of 2022”
Vogue, “12 New Queer Books to Read This Summer”
The Millions, “Most Anticipated”
Oprah Daily, “Must-Read Books by Latinx Authors”
TODAY, “18 Most Anticipated Latino Books of 2022”
SPIN, “Favorite Titles of 2022”
Electric Literature, “Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of 2022”
Hyperallergic, “Best Art Books of 2022”
Ms. Magazine, “Favorite Books of 2022”
Latinx in Publishing, “Most Anticipated 2022 Latinx Books”
Bustle, “Most Anticipated Books of 2022”
Latino Stories, “Best New Latinx Authors of 2022”

“In these essays by a poet, arts writer, and self-identified ‘queer brown butch,’ encounters in Los Angeles and the Southwest with aging punks, border activists, lesbian legends, and others give rise to explorations of Latinx identity, cultural resistance, and the role of art. . . . The landscape cannot be separated from its history of violence, and there is no desert vista ‘that doesn’t have the uncanny attached to it.’” —The New Yorker

“Singular and inimitable . . . focusing much of the collection on the physical land that has alternately sustained, commodified, and criminalized so many modes of being.” —Emma Specter, Vogue

“An essay can’t listen, but these come close, leaving room for questions left unanswered and realities left unlived. . . . Ambitious in scope and narrative structure, perhaps most impressive is the way in which [Gutiérrez] conquers such disparate terrain . . . to reveal how much connection we all share. There is no way to separate the political from the personal, no wall that could keep us from bleeding into one another. By blurring these lines, Gutiérrez invites us to consider how walls and borders are illusory, arbitrary, and restrictive. Freedom, alternatively, is something in motion.” —Rachel León, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Ferrets out the subterranean forces that fuel relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the land that marks our identity. Whether it is creating a cartography of queerness through family lineage and propinquity or digging through the layers of sorrow, love, and trauma to uncover the true borders and frontiers of our identity, each essay offers a unique consciousness at work.” —Ernesto Mestre-Reed, Oprah Daily

“In shapeshifting ekphrastic essays about collisions of fascism with aesthetics, Raquel Gutiérrez maps their own queer Latinx identity with intergenerational historicity, equal parts punk and poetic. A versatile political thinker whose twin backgrounds in arts criticism and zinesterism inform this blazing collection of prose, Gutiérrez shines bright light on the brutal injustice of borders, and elucidates the uncanny violence inherent to desert land art. . . . Dazzling.” —Sadie Dupuis, SPIN

“Poet Gutiérrez meditates on geography, gender, creativity, and love in her lyrical debut collection. . . . Written with energy, critical acumen, and raw emotion, this is as memorable as it is original.” —Publishers Weekly

“How do we map the terrains of love, land, and art? Gutiérrez engages these questions through stories of the borders that bind and those that break. . . . A bold and brave debut collection from an intriguing new literary voice. A probing, tender reckoning with space, place, and identity.” —Kirkus

“While art undergirds much of the collection, this is largely an exploration of Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘oddkin’—cultural/social/emotional family through, in Gutiérrez’s case, queerness, art-making, Latinx identity, and the Southwest. The relationships she fosters and interrogates, as carefully as she does physical structures and art production, are what drive these essays.” —Diana Arterian, Literary Hub

“Ranging from memoir to criticism to travelogue. . . . By exploring the places where stories are set, Gutiérrez reveals more about who’s in them.” —Nick Moran, The Millions

“With wit, curiosity, and compassion, Gutiérrez analyzes the real, material dangers caused by these made-up borders between us while also scrutinizing their existence. . . . Gutiérrez skillfully maps the realities, struggles, and joys of queer, Latinx, artistic life in the Southwest U.S. while also calling all readers to deconstruct the borders and boundaries that plague their own communities.” —Stef Rubino, Autostraddle

“A tribute to the power of art to provoke and challenge its viewers, the essays of Brown Neon are timely and affecting as they consider the nuances of queer Latinx life in the American Southwest.” —Rebecca Hussey, Foreword Reviews

“A wonderful collection of essays. . . . [Gutiérrez’s] prose is fresh, it feels personal. . . . Her multifaceted mindscape comes through on every page.” —Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic

“Thoughtfully tackles questions of gender, sexuality, and performance.” —K.W. Colyard, Bustle

“Brown Neon is a work of Latinx mysticism. With beauty, and unmistakable care for person and place, Raquel Gutiérrez maps life’s butchest, sweetest, and saddest mysteries.” —Myriam Gurba

“Brown Neon emerges as an instant foundational text, and Raquel Gutiérrez as a leading critic, witness, and visionary not only of the queer, brown Southwest, but our current American nightmare. Gutiérrez’s essays illuminate an otherwise ignored history of pivotal brown aesthetics that have changed the way some of us create and approach art. Beyond essential.” —Fernando A. Flores

“Raquel Gutiérrez has crafted, in these inspired and astonishing essays, an unforgettably affecting voice that recounts parables of brown life in the arts. In narratives that describe the intergenerational landscape of queer cultural memory and self-ecologies of Latinx innovation within the current U.S. political economy, Gutiérrez dazzles. Sentences here excite and punctuate as they convey the historical losses and embodied gains comprising all those energies that animate artists, activists, and storytellers alike to ‘sing in similar and simultaneous registers of scarcity and plethora.’” —Roberto Tejada