Gender Abolition as Border Crossings in Maya Piña's "Devenir transmigrante en la Windy City"

Gender Abolition as Border Crossings in Maya Piña's "Devenir transmigrante en la Windy City" S.B. West no nací mujer ni migrante; me hice en el camino y me suscribo a la rúbrica de Sor Juana, 'Yo, la peor de todas'" (Piña 131) Mi pueblo son las mulas. Las mal nacidas. Las sin nación. Apátridas. Me interesan los no-pueblos en proceso de invención, las no comunidades políticas cuya soberanía expresada como potencia excede los límites del poder. Los cuerpos silenciosos del mundo que no cualifican ni siquiera como pueblo. Los que llevan el futuro sobre su espalda y a los que nadie concede la legitimidad de sujeto político. El único estatus que entiendo es el de la extranjería. Habitar una tierra en la que no has nacido. Hablar una lengua que no es la tuya y, por tanto, hacerla vibrar con otro acento, hacer que sus palabras sean al mismo tiempo gramaticalmente correctas y fonéticamente desviadas. (Preciado 248) Palabras migrantes: 10 ensayistas mexican@s de Chicago (2018) is a collection of essays and short stories that attempt to address the "paradox" of "ser mexicano y chicagoense al mismo tiempo" (9). The collection's introductory note by editor José Ángel Navejas alludes to the fact that all authors meet the distinction of migrante ("migrant")1 as those who form part of a "Spanish-speaking population permanently End Page 99 located in the United States" and "for several decades" (11). Navejas's distinction addresses an imbalance of representation where much of US Spanish-language textual production is authored by those who Navejas labels as "intellectual tourists," a group of professionals and other constituents of an elite class that typically come to the US for a predetermined amount of time with affiliations to the private or academic spheres. Thus, by articulating the specificities of the author's migratory status, Navejas aims to distinguish the texts of Palabras migrantes as a literature derived en ("in") and not de ("of" or "from") the United States, which connotes a differently forged relationship with survival, belonging, and motivations for crossing national borders. This article aims to consider how "Devenir transmigrante en la Windy City," Maya Piña's contribution to Palabras migrantes, dialogues with research that addresses systemic forms of oppression at three definitional nexuses: the first, what I call gendered immigration; second, linguistic oppression; and finally, the rhetoric of the American Dream. To consider these junctures, I present three movements: in the first, entitled "The Abandonment of Subjecthood," I interweave considerations from a range of interdisciplinary scholars within trans theory, gender studies, and elsewhere to dialogue with Piña's litero-ethnographic work. While Piña's essay does not represent institutionalized or formal scholarly inquiry, let us be reminded by Navejas's introduction that race, gender, and class are too often mobilized to hierarchize forms of knowledge legitimated by the hegemon.2 My methodology is therefore informed by the assumption that intellectuality takes many forms as I place Piña's essay in conversation with scholarly insights on migration, transness, and the abolition of gender and borders. In the second movement, "A Dialogue on the Interconnectedness of Borders and Gender," I consider current trends in border and gender abolition that build upon gestures related to Piña's essay. Finally, in the third movement, "Language Radicality and the American Dream sic" I take up a second passage of Piña's essay that explores the evitable forms of capture and carcerality within liberal subjecthood, and how Piña manages this through resisting prescriptive orientations toward the Spanish language. Movement 1: The Abandonment of Subjecthood Maya Piña is a pillar to the Latin American and Latinx communities in the Chicagoland area and has been central to the development to the region's own published Spanish-language literature as a founder of El BeiSMan Press. Her activism includes End Page 100 the organization of cultural events, among them a yearly book fair known as the Feria Latinx del Libro designed to showcase Spanish-language texts published in the US. "Devenir transmigrante en la Windy City" is an...