Queer Eye: Stories Behind the Stories, Ep. 8
Borders. Borders. Borders. Las fronteras. Las fronteras. Las fronteras.
Los límites. Los límites. Los límites. Boundaries. Boundaries. Boundaries.
This episode makes me want to talk about Gloria Anzaldúa and, like a good comparatist, Ann Petry. Let me explain. (If you want to know why I’m embarking on this series, click here.)
The eighth episode in Queer Eye season 5 features Marcos, a fishmonger seeking to open a restaurant. Marcos and his wife, Alma, immigrated to Philadelphia, PA from Puebla, Mexico and have four children. Their oldest, Jennifer, is estranged at the time of filming. The Fab5 endeavor to help Marcos revamp his image so that it is more appropriate for a fishmonger-cum-restauranteur. They also help him reconcile with Jennifer. I wish there were more emphasis on having a translator the way that there was for their season in Japan.
In his introductory video, Marcos jubilantly explains his love of Benjamin Franklin. According to Marcos, Benjamin Franklin follows his dreams and encourages others to do so. Marcos even parrots a few Franklin quotations. Second funniest moment in the show for me? When Marcos says that when people ask him who is Benjamin Franklin, he holds up a hunnit dollar bill. I cackled.
Marcos’s story is definitely an immigrant story — about desire for success, entrepreneurship, and trying to maintain cultural ties through a family. I would hasten to add that the estrangement of his eldest daughter, Jennifer, is also part of the immigrant story. That is, children of immigrants often feel split between their parents’ culture and the culture in which they grow up. If scholarship has taught me anything, it is that the immigrant story is not simply the story of the people who move, but those who come after them. For Marcos, his immigrant story is bound up in his daughter’s.
Here is where I think of Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in Borderlands/La Frontera. Specifically, Anzaldúa describes the US-Mexico border as a place that shifts. Many might locate it geographically in what is now understood as the Southwestern US; however, I interpret Anzaldúa’s theory to mean that the US-Mexico border exists on several planes at once, including but not limited to geography and culture. So, wherever there is a Mexico-US encounter, there is the possibility of the borderlands/la frontera. Including Philadelphia. In addition, Anzaldúa describes this border as una herida abierta (an open wound) because border crossings are difficult and dangerous. Within Marcos’s story, Jennifer finds herself in the borderlands. It is not only her estrangement that is the herida (wound), but also the circumstances that cause her estrangement.
Benjamin Franklin is not an odd figure, especially for someone who dreams big, especially for someone with an entrepreneurial, capitalist spirit, especially for an immigrant to Philadelphia. However, people of color have to be careful in mapping Benjamin Franklin’s life to their own. Ann Petry, in her novel The Street (1946), depicts a Black woman, Lutie Johnson, who aspires to Benjamin Franklin-esque dreams of American capitalist prosperity and upward mobility. However, she neglects to account for all the inter-racial and intra-racial limitations to her dreams. She encounters obstacle after obstacle — all of them related to her race and gender. What’s more, her son, coerced by Lutie’s lascivious landlord, is arrested for tampering with mail. Lutie, rather than bend her approach and ditch the useless constraints of respectability, ditches her son in New York City and bends her focus toward Chicago, still in pursuit of her dreams.
Here’s where the borderlands/la frontera and Lutie Johnson converge: Jennifer is estranged because she refuses to be a sacrifice on the altar of her father’s dreams. I don’t want viewers to miss that she is the eldest daughter. Why is that important? Several reasons. First, the eldest child typically has to be the caregiver to the others, placing a large degree of responsibility on her shoulders. Second, the eldest child of immigrants tends to be the one that parents try their hardest to acculturate to their home culture. Third, as the eldest daughter, she becomes the child that the parents try to protect in very specifically gendered ways which include limiting her time with undesirable influences, expectations of her adult life (e.g., college, marriage), and expectations for her domestic life inside the home.
This is the cultural borderlands/la frontera that Marcos does not discuss. In all his jubilant talk about the possibilities of America, he does not admit what most people of color including immigrants know: America can be a scary place to live, to raise children. His desire to protect Jennifer from the seduction of America’s more insidious elements remains unvoiced. Much like Lutie, Marcos does not articulate a vision for his dreams that accounts for his particular circumstances, including immigrant status. As a result, his story is a little like Lutie’s: he has a difficult relationship with his daughter (though it seems to be on the way toward repair), and he has a need for culturally specific resources. Also, Marcos does not situate his need to work hard — “I can work for 20 hours and sleep for 4” — within a larger context that would acknowledge the language barrier, the lack of resources, the institutional racism, et cetera. There are similar concerns here to the ones I addressed in episode 2.
The Fivers help with this somewhat. Specifically, Karamo helps Marcos talk to Jennifer and she does show up at the soft opening of his restaurant. Bobby and Antoni create the space for his restaurant to have a soft opening: including pricing and décor. Tan polishes Marcos’s wardrobe so that he appears more like a businessman. By the way, an enthusiastic yes to the haberdashery! Jonathan emphasizes Marcos’s curls and provides a brief self-care routine so that Marcos does not overwork himself, and by extension his family, who all seem to be in on the fishmonger endeavor.
I appreciate the Fab5’s push for Marcos to understand masculinity differently. They help him understand that his family needs material provisions, but also emotional provisions. To my mind, this shift helps heal the herida abierta that exists between himself and his daughter. To put the icing on the cake, he tells the entire family that he is committing to healing his relationship with his daughter. It was so important, as Karamo and Tan note, for him to do that because it sets the tone for a new mode of being. It isn’t as clear whether he gets the resources he needs to more robustly interpret Benjamin Franklin though.
Post Script: The funniest moment is when Antoni attempts to eat jalapeños, immediately looks stunned, and cries because they’re too hot. I laughed so hard when Tan said “This is what happens when Caucasians get adventurous.” Third funniest moment: the new dog Walter with a Benjamin Franklin chew toy. Oh the loving shady possibilities.
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