Over the last ten years, I have repeatedly returned to teaching Aurora Guerrero's lovely, lyrical 2012 feature film Mosquita y Mari in my undergraduate classes on queer and feminist aesthetics. I often teach it in a section on race, space, and sexuality, alongside readings by Deb Vargas, Richard Rodriguez, Karen Tongson, and Martin Manalansan. Most recently I paired the film with Jorge Cruz's (2022) analysis of the photographer Fabian Guerrero's 2018 “Queer Brown Ranchero” series, which is rooted in the specificity of US/Mexico border masculinities. To my mind, this is precisely what continues to give Mosquita y Mari enduring relevance even a decade after its release: its meticulous attention to place and its evocation of what queerness looks, feels, and sounds like in those minor spaces not typically imagined as sites of queer culture but rather as sites hostile to queer existence.
When I first saw the...
