THE QUEER GHOST by Nube Hawk Cruz
The Queer Ghost is a text by Nube Hawk Cruz that traces how specters move through queer bars and archives, family kitchens and borderlands—arriving as candy piles, whispered lineages, and unburied stories. Braiding Indigenous cosmologies and Pueblo epistemologies with queer hauntology, Cruz asks how ghosts—of kin, of labor, of language—organize feeling and form. Through Avery Gordon’s “social haunting,” José Esteban Muñoz’s utopian reach, Gloria Anzaldúa’s border-thinking, and Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, the work locates beauty and survival in proletarian materials: aprons, cinder blocks, kitchen grease, photocopied flyers. The AIDS epidemic and a family myth of a lost uncle anchor an ethic of remembrance, while Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Portrait of Ross flickers as a tender site of love and loss. Across poem, essay, and image, the piece argues that invisibility is not absence but a crowded room—where Indigenous and queer specters refashion our relations, insist on accountability, and keep fragile histories in circulation.
—Nathan Storey
THE QUEER GHOST
Queer ghosts are everywhere, in gay bars and archives, in old cruising stops and family stories. The Queer ghost has functioned and existed via various temporalities, historic periods, traces of lineages in art, theory and visual culture. The queer ghost resides in the vernacular remnants of white cis divas regurgitating black trans iconographic words on television and in top 50 songs, the queer ghost lives in the breath of the contemporary queer academic reading Jose Esteban Muñoz or Gloria Anzaldúa and calling upon their spirits to haunt the halls of institutions. They hover in Felix Gonzalez-Torres installation ‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) where whispers of Ross Laycock's love adorn the candy pile. And it lives in the mysterious death of my uncle who migrated to the States and whose mythos exists in my family. He allegedly was run over while on his bicycle on his way to work at a kitchen in Orange County, but I believe was the first queer ghost in my family whose life was lost to the AIDS epidemic in the height of the pandemic.
“To be haunted and to write from that location … is not a methodology or a consciousness you can simply adopt or adapt as a set of rules or an identity. Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located.” — Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters (University of Minnesota Press, 1997; 2nd ed. 2008).
Gordon here subtly asks us to really look at our own ghosts, some that may be splinters of coloniality others that may be obvious remnants of historic holes that I adore exploring. Here ghosts linger as a site of invisibility in my research and work. Familial traces that domesticate colonial violence yet become spectral remnants of what I call Pueblo Epistemologies. Something that also is traced by my Grandmother's ghost stories from our little Pueblo in Mexico. The Indigenous traditions that I grew up with inspired this way of seeing and carrying these epistemologies. For ghost stories are just stories that help us be better people, learn about the dangers of the world, and just help us shape our familial cosmologies via critical fabulation and cuentos.
Sitting here with the queer ghost and thus the indigenous ghost I have traced my lineage to my uncle, my mom who passed away in 2019, and the legacy of violence against Zapotec, Yaqui, and first nation people in my family and urban indigenous communities. The queer ghost is not only a result of these spaces but pragmatically spectral traces of time. Or ethical encounters with the unresolved which changes the reader and the writer.
"Ghost" by Nube Cruz
Who believes in Indigenous people? And who believes in ghosts?
As Suzanne Kite writes, "Indigenous peoples must be erased, must be made into ghosts." The ghost-like status of the Indigenous perpetuated, ignored, erased continues the cycle of internal colonialism.
In this world, the settler positions himself as normal, as natural, while the Indigenous inhabitant becomes something unnatural, supernatural, even spectral, a lingering shadow.
And yet, even in their erasure, the ghost of the Indigenous and the queer never truly fades.I remember when I was five, visiting my grandma’s pueblo in Mexico. It was tradition: after dinner, we’d sit around, drinking coffee or hot chocolate, and tell stories, stories of aliens, witches, and ghosts. These stories were the rare moments when our family could be together. You see, most of my Abuelita’s children had migrated to the States. But those nights in the pueblo, with their smell of sweet cinnamon and warm coffee, felt like a world before the borders,before the fragmentation of families, before the language died with my grandmother, Juiana Acevedo, the matriarch. She was the last to speak it fluently. My mother understood, but never learned to speak it herself.
We became ghosts,the minute we left the pueblo, the minute we crossed that invisible line into the States. Because that’s how ghosts work, right? They exist in the spaces between, the places where borders divide not just land but identity, where the past clings to the present like a shadow, and where we, as Indigenous people, are perpetually disappeared.
I’ve always thought about ghosts as unseen agents of power, the kind that float through time, mysterious, yet so undeniably tied to history. In my work, I’ve come to realize that the specters, the Indigenous specters, are always present.They are woven into every part of what I do, into every photograph I take, every sculpture I make, every word I speak. I am part of this hauntological landscape.
So what is a ghost,
if not the Indigenous body,
The queer trace
torn apart to be erased,
invisible, nonexistent,
reduced to something mythic, something fictional?
What is a ghost,
if not a specter in a world that refuses to see it?
A specter of the past,
haunting the future.
Lately,
I’ve come to choose something else.
I choose to be a specter.
A specter isn’t just a ghost.
A specter is unsettling.
It’s haunting.
It’s uncanny,
the way Freud said the way that something from the past
presents itself in the present,
disturbing the normal.
I choose to be unsettling.
I choose to be otherworldly.
To come from a place where jade gleams in the sun, where the cempaxochitl blooms with color,
where rivers whisper and pyramids rise from the earth, where my ancestors danced in the shadows of mountains.
I choose to make work that speaks of these myths, the myths of my people,
the myths of my family.
I choose to speak my truths,
to write about ghosts, lost love, and cuirness
I make work that speaks to me,
to my ghosts,
to my Abuelita,
to my mother,
to my ancestors,
and to those who will come after me,
those who will carry my specter forward.
I choose to be the specter of all that is erased, and in doing so,
I will haunt this world,
unseen,
undone,
and unapologetic.
Because in a world that tries to forget,
The specter is the one who remembers.
And I am here to make sure you don’t forget.
1. Indigenous materiality
Indigenous mythologies exist via various forms. The first way I felt I was politicized and welcomed into the Zapotec worldview was when my Abuelita told us stories of Ghosts and Aliens in our pueblo in Oaxaca, Mexico. Visiting her meant helping kill chickens, defeather them, work the land, and listen to tales over cinnamon cafe and chocolate. Her food and her stories held together the fabric of our matriarchy before our family’s forced migration to the States.
Growing up as a half Yaqui, half Zapotec person in the U.S., I immersed myself in the science fiction worlds my grandmother’s stories hinted at. These tales became the most intimate things she passed down to me. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Sinners and my love for learning about Skinwalkers/Nahuales and other mythological creatures these stories politicized me and shaped my understanding of the world at large.
The ghost is often defined as a metaphysical trace of a person who once lived. The ghost is also mythically superimposed in land relations as well as mythological psychic spaces. For example “La Llorona” as haunting the border and rivers and serving as a sort of ghastly siren which can oscillate to the femicides that happen at the border and via sexual exploitation and trafficking. Cuentos, ghost stories carry traces of materiality.
Ghost for me here exists not just as a transcendental figure but an imminent one. Materially the ghost here is the clash of the psychic and the historic. These ghosts, these proletariat aesthetics, are part of my work. Encompassed in the indigenous migrant Mexican cook working in every kitchen in the USA, in the migrant child being interviewed in immigration court, in the food Yoris (white, non ndn ppl) eat that contains materials from the americas and ultimately indigenous technologies, and from materials-objects-land that is and has always been Native. Here the ghost serves not only as a spectral representation of the invisibilized migrant worker, but of the current political climate of the subaltern in the USA, the technologies consumed by westerners, the resources extracted by non natives, the commodification of aesthetics, and the very real materials known as ghost objects or proletariat objects in my work. My investigation here on the ghost figure is not just only an exploration of indigenous epistemology, or queer dissidence but one of material recognition and aesthetic and historical practices. The invisibility of this and the hyper invisibility of labor as well.
In my current work, I position Indigenous mythologies and speculative fabulations as sites of the uncanny and the subaltern. What does love look like when the world is ending again for Indigenous and queer kin, particularly under this political climate? How do Indigenous materials create speculative holes and retain agency in the face of settler simulation? How does constant adaptation, constant shapeshifting, become survivance?
“All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.”
— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.”
— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
2. My family's first ghost and the AIDS epidemic
Seeing my uncle's work in kitchens and construction sites has always held the aesthetic identity of indigenous materiality in my memory. From the cinder blocks used in construction, to the aprons that my uncles wore working in diners I always recognized these as objects of the working class, the proletariat and of the migrant. Because of the lack of educational access my mother was not even able to finish elementary school, her journey to raise three kids in the USA was very harsh. She died a premature death at 54 because of racial capitalism and colonization. I attribute these objects to the histories of the erased, like my mother’s journey to the states, and my uncles’ journey to surviving in this country.
I attribute part of my material practice to my Tio who I never met but who became part of the mythology of my family as he was the first ghost. My first queer figure. My tio who I always fantasize about being queer in Los Angeles during the 1980s was a cook in a kitchen in Orange County, he was on his bike when he was run over and forgotten. To this day I am not sure if his body was taken and properly buried as the mythos of his life remains a mystery because of his sexuality. He was in the States in the 1980s so I imagine he didn’t survive the AIDS epidemic. His story, like many, is pieced together through fragments, dreams, and inherited objects.
Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, I build speculative narratives through ghost materials and images. I reject the notion that beauty belongs only to the rich. Beauty, in fact, belongs to the poor. It is found in necessity, in ritual, in survival. As Hartman reminds us, the Black and for me Indigenous body are the origin of cultural production, and yet they are constantly rendered minor unfit for history, erased from the archive.
A great example of this is via “Sinners” and the scene where the Choctaw Native squad pops up on the screen and warns the white settlers about the vampires, to which they quickly disappear. This Minor Figure trope within media and society is a result as Saidiya states of how black and for me indigenous figures are kept invisibilized. I argue that invisibility is not absence, it is a site. The space where the Indigenous body exists is not empty because it is rich with memory, with potential, with collapse. This is where fabulation lives. This is where myth and material ruminate.
"Fantasmas"
Seeing my uncle's work in kitchens and construction sites has always held the aesthetic identity of indigenous materiality in my memory. From the cinder blocks used in construction, to the aprons that my uncles wore working in diners I always recognized these as objects of the working class, the proletariat and of the migrant. Because of the lack of educational access my mother was not even able to finish elementary school, her journey to raise three kids in the USA was very harsh. She died a premature death at 54 because of racial capitalism and colonization. I attribute these objects to the histories of the erased, like my mother’s journey to the states, and my uncles’ journey to surviving in this country.
I attribute part of my material practice to my Tio who I never met but who became part of the mythology of my family as he was the first ghost. My first queer figure. My tio who I always fantasize about being queer in Los Angeles during the 1980s was a cook in a kitchen in Orange County, he was on his bike when he was run over and forgotten. To this day I am not sure if his body was taken and properly buried as the mythos of his life remains a mystery because of his sexuality. He was in the States in the 1980s so I imagine he didn’t survive the AIDS epidemic. His story, like many, is pieced together through fragments, dreams, and inherited objects.
Drawing from Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, I build speculative narratives through ghost materials and images. I reject the notion that beauty belongs only to the rich. Beauty, in fact, belongs to the poor. It is found in necessity, in ritual, in survival. As Hartman reminds us, the Black and for me Indigenous body are the origin of cultural production, and yet they are constantly rendered minor unfit for history, erased from the archive.
A great example of this is via “Sinners” and the scene where the Choctaw Native squad pops up on the screen and warns the white settlers about the vampires, to which they quickly disappear. This Minor Figure trope within media and society is a result as Saidiya states of how black and for me indigenous figures are kept invisibilized. I argue that invisibility is not absence, it is a site. The space where the Indigenous body exists is not empty because it is rich with memory, with potential, with collapse. This is where fabulation lives. This is where myth and material ruminate.
Nube Cruz is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working across photography, performance, and sculpture. Their practice conjures “ghost objects” and pueblo epistemologies that bridge Indigenous memory, queer hauntology, and migrant materiality. A graduate of UCLA and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and currently an MFA candidate at UC San Diego, Cruz’s work explores diasporic cosmologies, post-collapse survivance, and the poetics of the unseen. Through baroque-esque materials, photographs, and performative gestures, they trace how ghosts, archives, and proletarian materials transmit histories of opacity, survivance, and queer affect.
@nubehawkcruz
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. Gonzalez-Torres, Felix. “Untitled ( Portrait of Ross in L.A. ).” 1991, Art Institute of Chicago.
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 12, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2007-012
Kite, Suzanne. “What’s on Earth Is in the Stars.” 2021. PDF. https://www.c21uwm.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Kite_Whats-on-earth-is-in-the-stars_202 1.pdf
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009
.@nubehawkcruz
Works Cited
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. Gonzalez-Torres, Felix. “Untitled ( Portrait of Ross in L.A. ).” 1991, Art Institute of Chicago.
Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 12, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2007-012
Kite, Suzanne. “What’s on Earth Is in the Stars.” 2021. PDF. https://www.c21uwm.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Kite_Whats-on-earth-is-in-the-stars_202 1.pdf
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009