(On behalf of Alexander Lalama - registration pending) “American and Barrio Gothics in the Work of Laura Aguilar”

In this paper, I identify the use of what I call the Barrio Gothic within Laura Aguilar corpus of work, focusing in particular on her Plush Pony Series. The framing of the photos recalls Grant Wood’s American Gothic, which Wanda Corn argues “evoke[s] so many mythic strains of our national experience” (206). Through portraiture, Aguilar cites Wood’s canonical piece, transporting his Gothic elements from the Midwest to inner-city experiences of the East Los Angeles barrio: marginalization, entrapment, and isolation--all hallmarks of the American Gothic genre and aesthetic mode. My notion of the Barrio Gothic extends the views of the Gothic as it represents the reality of barrio existence that also ensures survival, both in the present, material world, as well as in leaving residual, spectral evidence of queer Latinx pasts that serve to validate, inform, and empower, queer, Latinx futurity. Occupying a queer, brown, Chicana body, Aguilar is herself subjected to the Barrio Gothic. Her complicated feelings about her own work impose and project the way she internalizes this Barrio Gothic existence; but, she is also haunted by the result of the images of joy that she produced, photographs that become nearly supernatural in the way they celebrate entrapment in the space of the bar. The precarious nature of the thin veil between the Plush Pony photos and the Gothic forces in the barrio become haunting in their beauty and queer jubilance.