This article is about the intimacies between a Chicana sexuality studies ethnographer and two narrators—late Chicana singer Jenni Rivera and adult star Yurizan Beltran. All three Chicana femmes grew up in Long Beach, California, one of the most diverse cities in the country, with parents of Mexican descent. Both narrators passed away in the same month, five years apart, and are memorialized in Long Beach. They are all icons of Chicana/Mexicana sexuality and contribute to its immigrant sexual economy—either by singing about it, engaging in sex work, participating in fandom, or writing about it for research. The author employs the “ethnographic I” to reflect on how her own experience in a black dress as a teenager created a sense of proximity to the singer and the porn star and how they all navigated immigrant sexual economies. Through performance, autoethnography, and haunting as epistemic tools, the author reads the black dress worn by all three women in the mid-2000s as a symbol of what she refers to as “vulgar feminism”: a working-class Chicana/Mexicana sexual economy that embraces vulgarity to empower brown femmes and build a better future. The article shows that even without knowing each other, these women collectively crafted this immigrant vulgar feminist practice, rooted in puta conocimientos (slutty knowledges), that challenges and redefines traditional feminist values. The meditations with the black dress help the author argue that for racialized sexuality scholars, critical autoethnography—through performative hauntings—helps us uncover the connections between our past experiences and the ethnographic or cultural texts we examine.
Yessica Garcia Hernandez (Thu,) studied this question.