Of Mothers and Mutants: Mario Acevedo Torero’s Queer Cartography of Loss

This essay brings counterhumanist and queer feminist approaches to bear on issues of maternity, intimacy, loss, cartography, and affect. I turn to Mario Acevedo Torero’s mural The Rage of La Raza (1974) to consider lost histories, lost subjects, and—extending Sylvia Wynter—a genre of loss. I contend that Torero memorializes Mexican Indigenous and Asian American mothers who, rendered absent by the violences of US legislation and court rulings, continue to haunt the legal and extralegal systems of classification that have “queered” their Chicanx and mixed-race Asian American children as mutants and outsiders. By conjuring these ghost mothers, this artist resists the erasure of unruly intimacies between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and related genealogies of knowledge, that has enabled racial, settler, and imperial regimes of liberal humanist governance. Furthermore, in using the mural as a map, Torero expands the borderlands into Asian waters, allowing the viewer to feel and think beyond the strictures of dominant nationalisms. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates the valuable interventions that Chicanx aesthetic practices can make within multiple subfields of critical ethnic studies, settler colonial studies, and Chicanx feminist studies.