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“Customers Also Bought…”How Readers Connect Gay Chicano Writers on Amazon.comBy Doug Bush, PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and PortugueseWhether for school or pleasure, manyof us have become accustomed to buyingour books online. Indeed, I normally turnto Amazon.com first because I can findvirtually anything I’m looking for, manytimes in a variety of formats (physicalcopy, Kindle edition, used, etc.), and theyarrive quickly. Sometimes I find things thatI wasn’t looking for, thanks to dynamicsearch results that display what othercustomers who purchased my item alsobought. While many online book retailersdisplay lists of items frequently purchasedtogether, Amazon is unique in displayinghow individual authors are connectedthrough customer purchases. When Ibuy a work such as Rigoberto González’sButterfly Boy, my previous purchases influencewhich authors the next customer seeson González’s Author Page. For researcherslike myself, these connections offernot only a unique opportunity to see howreaders connect authors, but they alsoprovide new ways of approaching longerstanding research questions.I came to my current project hopingto uncover how gay Chicanoauthors have formed authorialcommunities and shared identities,much like their ChicanaFeminist counterparts havedone over the past severaldecades. Chicanas saw theirvoices shut out of the broaderChicano movement of the1960s and 1970s, which is whythey worked together to createa space to express their subjectivities.This was particularlyimportant for queer Chicanaswho did not see themselvesreflected in broader feminist orqueer movements, includingnow well-known names suchas Cherríe Moraga and GloriaAnzaldúa.As other researchers haveexplained, gay Chicano writersdid not follow the same pathas Chicana feminists, and havebeen subject to some harshcriticism because of it. In herseminal essay “Queer Aztlán,”Moraga writes that her queer brothers wereable to hide behind their gender and thusstill the dominant voices in the Chicanocommunity. Here, she cites well-knownChicano authors Arturo Islas and RichardRodriguez as particular examples. While wecan debate Moraga’s reasoning, it was notuntil the late 1990s that gay Latino authorsbegan to create the sorts of unifying collectionsthat Chicana and other feministsof color had produced almost two decadesearlier in This Bridge Called My Back (1981)and Cuentos: Stories By Latinas (1983).Nevertheless, even considering theseworks, which include Bésame Mucho (1999)and Virgins, Guerrillas and Locas (1999), aslate as 2010, Rigoberto González wrote thatgay Latinos have still not formally coalescedinto the coherent community that theirChicana counterparts did decades earlier.In my current project, I want to movebeyond the idea of gay Chicano authorscreating literary communities and identities,and instead focus on the role of thereader. I move past the established generationof gay Chicano authors, includingArturo Islas, Rigoberto Rodriguez, JohnRechy, and Michael Nava, and toward thenext generation—Alex Espinoza, RigobertoGonzález, and Manuel Muñoz—who haveall published mostly within the past decade.Espinoza released his first novel, Still WaterSaints, in 2007, and his second, The Five Actsof Diego León in March of 2013. Muñoz haspublished two very well received collectionsof short stories, Zigzagger (2003) andThe Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (2007), andthe recent novel What You See in the Dark(2011). González, meanwhile, may be themost prolific gay Latino author of his age.His works include collections of poetry,short stories, a novel, an autobiography,children’s books and novels for gay Latinoadolescents, with two more titles slated forrelease in 2013. His most well-known workis the autobiography Butterfly Boy (2006),which is also consistently his best-sellingbook on Amazon, and one of the few gayChicano biographical works on the market.While González and Muñoz in particularhave been far more open in expressingtheir sexualities in their literature thanmany of the earlier generation of gayChicano authors, they still have not formallycoalesced into the same type of communityas the Chicana Feminists. Instead ofrehashing this point, this project insteadturns toward the reader, and how they mayform communities of authors. Amazon.com is critical in this research because itoffers a world of insight that we have neverhad before. When looking up a book, thewebsite displays of list of books under“Customers Who Bought This Item AlsoBought,” while author pages list connectedwriters under “Customers Also BoughtItems By.” Our buying patterns decide theserankings—if I purchase Sandra Cisneros’best-selling The House on Mango Street andlater buy Muñoz’s Zigzagger, my clicks helpdetermine how the next customer seesthese authors connected.I decided to focus solely on Amazonfor a number of reasons: it is now thelargest bookseller in the country, it offersa wealth of insight into buying patterns,and importantly, the company does notposition books based on who publishedthem. In a traditional store such as Barnes6