LibGuides: Williams Institute Reading Room: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resources in Law and Public Policy: LGBT Latinos/Latinas

Page Guide

Williams Policy Studies

LGBT Latino/a Individuals and Latino/a Same-Sex Couples. Angeliki Kastanis, Gary J. Gates. (The Williams Institute, 2013) HQ76.3.U5 K345 2013 *Online access.

California's latino/latina LGB population. Christopher Ramos, Gary J. Gates. (The Williams Institute, 2008) HQ76.3.U52 C355 *Online access.

Latino/as in same-sex couples in California: data from Census 2000 = Latino(as) en parejas del mismo sexo en California, datos del Censo 2000. Gary Gates and R. Bradley Sears. (Williams Project, 2005) KF4754.5 .P65 2005k; also *Online access.

LGBT Latinx/Latinas/Latinos, 2020 -

Queering the Border: Essays by Emma Pérez
Call Number: HQ76.3.U5 P47 2023
ISBN: 9781558859586
Publication Date: 2022-11-30
"You will never know how it feels to have brown skin and a Mexican name. You will never know what it is like to watch your mother struggle with white words." In this collection of prose pieces, author and scholar Emma Pérez explores the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality. A Chicanx queer lesbian "who honors my mother and her plight within patriarchal institutions" that limit women's choices and opportunities, Pérez writes about issues-including sexual politics and power relations between Anglo and Hispanic men-that have impacted her Tejano family for generations. A historian by training, her work aims to decolonize the Southwest by uncovering voices from the past that validate multiple experiences. Essays reveal the influence of Gloria Anzaldúa's scholarship; recount the controversy surrounding artist Alma López's digital print, "Our Lady," in which the Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a provocative bikini; and evaluate interviews with 25 LGBTQ people in the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area to expose life on the border as a queer of color. This collection also includes short fiction and an epistolary love poem to the first feminist of the Americas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, or in this case, Sor Juanx. Bringing together the work of a noted Chicanx writer and academic, this volume reinforces the body of work by LGBTQ people of color dealing with racism and sexism, conquest and colonization, power and privilege, all with a particular emphasis on the Southwest borderlands.
*Also available online (UC users only)
L.A. Interchanges: A Brown & Queer Archival Memoir by Lydia Otero
Call Number: HQ76.25 .O84 2023
ISBN: 9781734118087
Publication Date: 2023-07-31
Part working-class memoir and part documentary history, L.A. Interchanges follows Lydia Otero as they move from the homes of family members, dancefloors, work sites, and Los Angeles's organizing spaces in search of brown and queer belonging. Through photographs, archival documents, and compelling storytelling, Otero weaves a gripping, passionate narrative of personal becoming amid the political and cultural currents of 1980s Los Angeles.Grounded in the philosophy that the personal is political, Otero portrays fellow organizers as strategists exploring previously unimagined avenues to address the needs of brown queers. The book traces Otero's transformations and blossoming sense of self, which often felt constrained by the binary gender assignments of the time, while it tells a documentary history of Lesbians of Color, Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), Lesbianas Unidas (LU) and Bienestar: A Gay Latino AIDS Project-groups central to the city's burgeoning queer, brown, and activist scene. Otero's parallel story of becoming an electrician offers a unique vantage point of a city in the midst of restructuring, as Otero's labor contributed to building some of the most iconic structures in Los Angeles, such as the U.S. Bank Tower, Universal Studios' CityWalk, and the Metro Rail.
*See also Otero's 2019 memoir, In the Shadows of the Freeway: Growing Up Brown and Queer.
Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons by Anthony Christian Ocampo
Call Number: HQ76.2.U52 C263 2022
ISBN: 1479824259
Publication Date: 2022-09-19
The stories of second-generation immigrant gay men coming of age in Los Angeles. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA could not have felt further removed from a world where queerness was accepted and celebrated. Instead, the men profiled here maneuver through family and friendship circles where masculinity dominates, gay sexuality is unspoken, and heterosexuality is strictly enforced. For these men, the path to sexual freedom often involves chasing the dreams while resisting the expectations of their immigrant parents--and finding community in each other. Ocampo also details his own story of reconciling his queer Filipino American identity and those of men like him. He shows what it was like for these young men to grow up gay in an immigrant family, to be the one gay person in their school and ethnic community, and to be a person of color in predominantly White gay spaces. Brown and Gay in LA is an homage to second-generation gay men and their radical redefinition of what it means to be gay, to be a man, to be a person of color, and, ultimately, what it means to be an American.
*Available online (UC users only)
I'm Not Broken: A Memoir by Jesse Leon
Call Number: HQ75.8.L465 A3 2022
ISBN: 0593466519
Publication Date: 2022-08-23
In this unflinching and inspiring memoir, Jesus Leon tells an extraordinary story of resilience and survival, shining a light on a childhood spent devastated by sex trafficking, gang life, and substance abuse. Born to indigenous working-class Mexican immigrants in San Diego in the 1970s, Jesse Leon's childhood was violently ruptured. A dangerous and harrowing encounter at a local gift shop when he was eleven years old left Jesse with a deadly secret. Hurt, alone, and scared for his life, Jesse numbed his pain by losing himself in the hyper-masculine culture of the streets and wherever else he could find it--in alcohol, drugs, and prostitution. Overlooked by state-sanctioned institutions and systems intended to help victims of abuse, neglected like many other low-income Latinos, Jesse spiraled into cycles of suicide and substance abuse. I'm Not Broken is the heartbreaking and remarkable story of the journey Jesse takes to win back his life, leading him to the steps of Harvard University. From being the lone young person of color in Narcotics Anonymous meetings to coming to terms with his own sexual identity, to becoming an engaged mentor for incarcerated youth, Jesse finds the will to live with the love and support of his family, friends, and mentors. Recounting the extraordinary circumstances of his life, Jesse offers a powerful, raw testament to the possibilities of self-transformation and self-acceptance. Unforgettable, I'm Not Broken is an inspirational portrait of one young man's indomitable strength and spirit to survive--against all possible odds.
Brown Neon: Essays by Raquel Gutiérrez
Call Number: PS3607.U819 B76 2022
ISBN: 1566896371
Publication Date: 2022-06-07
A meditation on southwestern terrains, intergenerational queer dynamics, and surveilled brown artists that crosses physical and conceptual borders. Part butch memoir, part ekphrastic travel diary, part queer family tree, Raquel Gutiérrez's debut essay collection, Brown Neon, gleans insight from the sediment of land and relationships. For Gutiérrez, terrain is essential to understanding that no story, no matter how personal, is separate from the space where it unfolds. Whether contemplating the value of adobe as both vernacular architecture and commodified art object, highlighting the feminist wounding and transphobic apparitions haunting the multigenerational lesbian social fabric, or recalling a failed romance, Gutiérrez traverses complex questions of gender, class, identity, and citizenship with curiosity and nuance.
*Also available as eBook (UC users only)
In the Shadow of the Mountain: A Memoir of Courage by Silvia Vasquez-Lavado
Call Number: GV199.92.V37 A3 2022
ISBN: 1250776740
Publication Date: 2022-02-01
"In climbing the Seven Summits, Silvia Vasquez-Lavado did nothing less than take back her own life--one brave step at a time. She will inspire untold numbers of souls with this story, for her victory is a win on behalf of all of us."--Elizabeth Gilbert.
Endless ice. Thin air. The threat of dropping into nothingness thousands of feet below. This is the climb Silvia Vasquez-Lavado braves in her page-turning, pulse-raising memoir following her journey to Mount Everest. A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she'd suffered as a child, she started climbing. Something about the brute force required for the ascent--the risk and spirit and sheer size of the mountains and death's close proximity--woke her up. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest. "The Mother of the World," as it's known in Nepal, allows few to reach her summit, but Silvia didn't go alone. She gathered a group of young female survivors and led them to base camp alongside her. It was never easy. At times hair-raising, nerve-racking, and always challenging, Silvia remembers the acute anxiety of leading a group of novice climbers to Everest's base, all the while coping with her own nerves of summiting. But, there were also moments of peace, joy, and healing with the strength of her fellow survivors and community propelling her forward. In the Shadow of the Mountain is a remarkable story of heroism, one which awakens in all of us a lust for adventure, an appetite for risk, and faith in our own resilience.
Abuela in Shadow, Abuela in Light by Rigoberto González
Call Number: PS3557.O4695 Z46 2022
ISBN: 9780299337605
Publication Date: 2022-04-12
Standing over two graves, Rigoberto González studies the names "Ramon" and "María" under the family name "González." "She was María Carrillo, not María González," he thinks. His grandmother is missing. So begins González's memoir, a journey to recover a more complete picture of his grandmother, who raised him following his mother's death. González travels to his abuela’s birthplace, Michoacán, Mexico, and along the way recovers his memories of a past he had tried to leave behind. A complex woman who was forced to take on maternal roles and suffered years of abuse, his grandmother simultaneously resisted traditional gender roles; she was kind yet unaffectionate, and she kept many secrets in a crowded household with little personal space. Sifting through family histories and anecdotes, González pieces together the puzzling life story of a woman who was present in her grandson’s life yet absent during his emotional journey as a young man discovering his sexuality and planning his escape from a toxic and abusive environment. From fragments of memory and story, González ultimately creates a portrait of an unconventional yet memorable grandmother, a hard-working Indigenous Mexican woman who remained an enigma while she was alive. A grandmother, he shows, is more than what her descendants remember; she is also all that has been forgotten or never known. Through this candid exploration of his own family, González explores how we learn to remember and honor those we’ve lost.
High-Risk Homosexual: A Memoir by Edgar Gomez
Call Number: HQ75.8.G72 A3 2022
ISBN: 1593767056
Publication Date: 2022-01-11
This witty memoir traces a touching and often hilarious spiralic path to embracing a gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo--from a cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to cities across the U.S.--and the bath houses, night clubs, and drag queens who help redefine pride A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez's uncle's cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor's office where he was diagnosed a "high-risk homosexual." With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.
Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Call Number: HQ77.2.U6 L3 2021
ISBN: 0472054279
Publication Date: 2021-04-05
Translocas focuses on drag and transgender performance and activism in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Arguing for its political potential, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes explores the social and cultural disruptions caused by Latin American and Latinx "locas" (effeminate men, drag queens, transgender performers, and unruly women) and the various forms of violence to which queer individuals in Puerto Rico and the U.S. are subjected. This interdisciplinary, auto-ethnographic, queer-of-color performance studies book explores the lives and work of contemporary performers and activists including Sylvia Rivera, Nina Flowers, Freddie Mercado, Javier Cardona, Jorge Merced, Erika Lopez, Holly Woodlawn, Monica Beverly Hillz, Lady Catiria, and Barbra Herr; television programs such as RuPaul's Drag Race; films such as Paris Is Burning, The Salt Mines, and Mala Mala; and literary works by authors such as Mayra Santos-Febres and Manuel Ramos Otero. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a drag performer himself, demonstrates how each destabilizes (and sometimes reifies) dominant notions of gender and sexuality through drag and their embodied transgender expression. These performances provide a means to explore and critique issues of race, class, poverty, national identity, and migratory displacement while they posit a relationship between audiences and performers that has a ritual-like, communal dimension. The book also analyzes the murders of Jorge Steven López Mercado and Kevin Fret in Puerto Rico, and invites readers to challenge, question, and expand their knowledge about queer life, drag, trans performance, and Puerto Rican identity in the Caribbean and the diaspora. The author also pays careful attention to transgender experience, highlighting how trans activists and performers mold their bodies, promote social change, and create community in a context that oscillates between glamour and abjection.
The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida by Karen Jaime
Call Number: PS153.S39 J35 2021
ISBN: 1479808288
Publication Date: 2021-06-29
A queer genealogy of the famous performance space and the nuyorican aesthetic. One could easily overlook the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a small, unassuming performance venue on New York City's Lower East Side. Yet the space once hosted the likes of Victor Hernández Cruz, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka and is widely credited as the homespace for the emergent nuyorican literary and aesthetic movement of the 1990s. Founded by a group of counterculturalist Puerto Rican immigrants and artists in the 1970s, the space slowly transformed the Puerto Rican ethnic and cultural associations of the epithet "Nuyorican," as the Cafe developed into a central hub for an artistic movement encompassing queer, trans, and diasporic performance. The Queer Nuyorican is the first queer genealogy and critical study of the historical, political, and cultural conditions under which the term "Nuyorican" shifted from a raced/ethnic identity marker to "nuyorican," an aesthetic practice. The nuyorican aesthetic recognizes and includes queer poets and performers of color whose writing and performance build upon the politics inherent in the Cafe's founding. Initially situated within the Cafe's physical space and countercultural discursive history, the nuyorican aesthetic extends beyond these gendered and ethnic boundaries, broadening the ethnic marker Nuyorican to include queer, trans, and diasporic performance modalities. Hip-hop studies, alongside critical race, queer, literary, and performance theories, are used to document the interventions made by queer and trans artists of color--Miguel Piñero, Regie Cabico, Glam Slam participants, and Ellison Glenn/Black Cracker--whose works demonstrate how the Nuyorican Poets Cafe has operated as a queer space since its founding. In focusing on artists who began their careers as spoken word artists and slam poets at the Cafe, The Queer Nuyorican examines queer modes of circulation that are tethered to the increasing visibility, commodification, and normalization of spoken word, slam poetry, and hip-hop theater in the United States and abroad.
Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Spaces by Ellie D. Hernández (Editor); Eddy Francisco Alvarez (Editor); Magda García (Editor); Eddy Francisco Alvarez (Editor)
Call Number: HQ77.95.U6 T74 2021
ISBN: 1496225899
Publication Date: 2021-06-01
Within a trans-embodied framework, this anthology identifies transmovimientos as the creative force or social mechanism through which queer, trans, and gender nonconforming Latinx communities navigate their location and calibrate their consciousness. This anthology unveils a critical perspective with the emphasis on queer, trans, and gender nonconforming communities of immigrants and social dissidents who reflect on and write about diaspora and migratory movements while navigating geographical and embodied spaces across gendered and racialized contexts, all crucial elements of the trans-movements taking place in the United States. This collection forms a nuanced conversation between scholarship and social activism that speaks in concrete ways about diasporic and migratory LGBTQ communities who suffer from immoral immigration policies and political discourses that produce untenable living situations. The focal point of analysis throughout Transmovimientos examines migratory movements and anti-immigrant sentiment, homophobia, and stigma toward people who are transgender, immigrants, and refugees. These deliberate consciousness-based expressions are designed to realign awareness about the body in transit and the diasporic experience of relocating and emerging into new possibilities.
¡Hola Papi! How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons by John Paul Brammer
Call Number: HQ75.8.B7245 A3 2021
ISBN: 1982141492
Publication Date: 2021-06-08
LGBTQ advice columnist John Paul Brammer writes a "wise and charming" (David Sedaris) memoir-in-essays chronicling his journey from a queer, mixed-race kid in America's heartland to becoming the "Chicano Carrie Bradshaw" of his generation. The first time someone called John Paul (JP) Brammer "Papi" was on the gay hookup app Grindr. At first, it was flattering; JP took this as white-guy speak for "hey, handsome." But then it happened again and again...and again, leaving JP wondering: Who the hell is Papi? Soon, this racialized moniker became the inspiration for his now wildly popular advice column "¡Hola Papi!," launching his career as the Cheryl Strayed for young queer people everywhere--and some straight people too. JP had his doubts at first--what advice could he really offer while he himself stumbled through his early twenties? Sometimes the best advice comes from looking within, which is what JP does in his column and book--and readers have flocked to him for honest, heartfelt wisdom, and more than a few laughs. In this hilarious, tenderhearted book, JP shares his story of growing up biracial and in the closet in America's heartland, while attempting to answer some of life's most challenging questions: How do I let go of the past? How do I become the person I want to be? Is there such a thing as being too gay? Should I hook up with my grade school bully now that he's out of the closet? Questions we've all asked ourselves, surely. ¡Hola Papi! is "a warm, witty compendium of hard-won life lessons," (Harper's Bazaar) for anyone--gay, straight, and everything in between--who has ever taken stock of their unique place in the world.
Fathers, Fathering, and Fatherhood: Queer Chicano/Mexicano Desire and Belonging by Adelaida R. Del Castillo (Editor); Gibrán Güido (Editor)
Call Number: HQ76.2.U5 F37 2021
ISBN: 303060876X
Publication Date: 2021-04-30
Bringing together a unique collection of narrative accounts based on the lived experience of queer Chicano/Mexicano sons, this book explores fathers, fathering, and fatherhood. In many ways, the contributors reveal the significance of fathering and representations of fatherhood in the context of queer male sexuality and identity across generations, cultures, class, and Mexican immigrant and Mexican American families. They further reveal how father figures--godfathers, grandfathers, and others--may nurture and express love and hope for the queer young men in their extended family. Divided into six sections, the book addresses the complexity of father-queer son relationships; family dynamics; the impact of neurodiverse mental health issues; the erotic, unsafe, and taboo qualities of desire; encounters with absent, estranged or emotionally distant fathers; and a critical analysis of father and queer son relationships in Chicano/Latino literature and film.
I'm a Wild Seed by Sharon Lee De La Cruz
Call Number: HQ75.4.D24 A3 2021
ISBN: 195149105X
Publication Date: 2021-04-13
"The queer community is lucky to have Sharon on our side, using her skills and passions to create a better world for all of us."--Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. A collection of lively autobiographical comics guiding the reader through an understanding of queerness and what it means to one woman of color. In this delightfully compelling full-color graphic memoir, the author shares her process of undoing the effects of a patriarchal, colonial society on her self-image, her sexuality, and her concept of freedom. Reflecting on the ways in which oppression was the cause for her late bloom into queerness, we are invited to discover people and things in the author's life that helped shape and inform her LGBTQ identity. And we come to an understanding of her holistic definition of queerness.
Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies by Francisco J. Galarte
Call Number: HQ77.95.U6 G454 2021
ISBN: 1477322124
Publication Date: 2021-01-28
Within queer, transgender, and Latinx and Chicanx cultural politics, brown transgender narratives are frequently silenced and erased. Brown trans subjects are treated as deceptive, unnatural, nonexistent, or impossible, their bodies, lives, and material circumstances represented through tropes and used as metaphors. Restoring personhood and agency to these subjects, Francisco J. Galarte advances "brown trans figuration" as a theoretical framework to describe how transness and brownness coexist within the larger queer, trans, and Latinx historical experiences. Brown Trans Figurations presents a collection of representations that reveal the repression of brown trans narratives and make that repression visible and palpable. Galarte examines the violent deaths of two transgender Latinas and the corresponding narratives that emerged about their lives, analyzes the invisibility of brown transmasculinity in Chicana feminist works, and explores how issues such as immigration rights activism can be imagined as part of an LGBTQ rights-based political platform. This book considers the contexts in which brown trans narratives appear, how they circulate, and how they are reproduced in politics, sexual cultures, and racialized economies.
Nepantla Squared: Transgender Mestiz@ Histories in Times of Global Shift by Linda Heidenreich
Call Number: HQ77.9
ISBN: 9781496213402
Publication Date: 2020-10-01
Nepantla Squared maps the lives of two transgender mestiz@s, one during the turn of the twentieth century and one during the turn of the twenty-first century, to chart the ways race, gender, sex, ethnicity, and capital function differently in different times. To address the erasure of transgender mestiz@ realities from history, Linda Heidenreich employs an intersectional analysis that critiques monopoly and global capitalism. Heidenreich builds on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of nepantleras, those who could live between and embody more than one culture, to coin the term nepantla², marking times of capitalist transition where gender was also in motion. Transgender mestiz@s, too, embodied that movement. Heidenreich insists on a careful examination of the multiple in-between spaces that construct lives between cultures and genders during in-between times of shifting empire and capital. In so doing, they offer an important discussion of race, class, nation, and citizenship centered on transgender bodies of color that challenges readers to rethink the way they understand the gendered social and economic challenges of today.
*ebook (UC users only)
My Sister: How One Sibling's Transition Changed Us Both by Selenis Leyva; Marizol Leyva
Call Number: HQ77.8.L49 A3 2020
ISBN: 9781541762954
Publication Date: 2020-03-24
A powerful memoir by two sisters about transitioning, family, and the path to self-realization. When Orange Is the New Black and Diary of a Future President star Selenis Leyva was young, her hardworking parents brought a new foster child into their warm, loving family in the Bronx. Selenis was immediately smitten; she doted on the baby, who in turn looked up to Selenis and followed her everywhere. The little boy became part of the family. But later, the siblings realized that the child was struggling with their identity. As Marizol transitioned and fought to define herself, Selenis and the family wanted to help, but didn't always have the language to describe what Marizol was going through or the knowledge to help her thrive. In My Sister, Selenis and Marizol narrate, in alternating chapters, their shared journey, challenges, and triumphs. They write honestly about the issues of violence, abuse, and discrimination that transgender people and women of color--and especially trans women of color--experience daily. And they are open about the messiness and confusion of fully realizing oneself and being properly affirmed by others, even those who love you. Profoundly moving and instructive, My Sister offers insight into the lives of two siblings learning to be their authentic selves. Ultimately, theirs is a story of hope, one that will resonate with and affirm those in the process of transitioning, watching a loved one transition, and anyone taking control of their gender or sexual identities.

LGBT Latinx/Latinas/Latinos, 2010 - 2019

In the Shadows of the Freeway: Growing Up Brown and Queer by Lydia Otero
Call Number: HQ73.3 U6 O84 2019
ISBN: 9781734118001
Publication Date: 2019-12-01
Raised in an adobe house built by their mother, the author takes readers to a mid-20th century barrio that existed on the social margins of Tucson, Arizona despite sitting a little more than a mile away from the central business district. Born in 1955, and nicknamed La Butch by their family, Lydia Otero knew they were queer the moment their consciousness had evolved enough to formulate thoughts. In addition to growing up fighting assigned gender expectations, a new freeway greatly influenced formative aspects of Otero's childhood. The author witnessed how the steady expansion of Interstate 10 (I-10) separated and isolated a barrio of brown and poor residents from the rest of the city. Growing up 200 feet from the freeway meant more than enduring traffic noise and sirens for barrio families. It introduced environmental hazards that contributed to the death of family members. The construction of the freeway also realigned school boundaries. Although able to attend the same the same schools as white children, the author details how Americanization policies and programs worked to racialize and separate brown students such as Otero as late as 1961. This book, which combines personal memoir and family history with historical archives, offers more self-disclosure than Otero's previous works, as the author's experiences of childhood take center stage. Otero reveals the day-to-day survival mechanisms they depended upon, the exhilaration of first love, the love of reading and the support the author received from key family members as they tried to gain a sense of belonging in a world mired in dislocation.
Ordinary Girls: A Memoir by Jaquira Díaz
Call Number: PS3604.I176 Z46 2019
ISBN: 1616209135
Publication Date: 2019-10-29
In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn't find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover's Educated, Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz's memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history--and reads as electrically as a novel.
Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde by Robb Hernández
Call Number: HQ76.2.U5 H475 2019
ISBN: 1479845302
Publication Date: 2019-11-19
*eBook (UC users only); also at Young Research Library.
Critically reimagines Chicanx art, unmasking its queer afterlife Emboldened by the boom in art, fashion, music, and retail culture in 1980s Los Angeles, the iconoclasts of queer Aztlán--as Robb Hernández terms the group of artists who emerged from East LA, Orange County, and other parts of Southern California during this period--developed a new vernacular with which to read the city in bloom. Tracing this important but understudied body of work, Archiving an Epidemic catalogs a queer retelling of the Chicana and Chicano art movement, from its origins in the 1960s, to the AIDS crisis and the destruction it wrought in the 1980s, and onto the remnants and legacies of these artists in the current moment. Hernández offers a vocabulary for this multi-modal avant-garde--one that contests the heteromasculinity and ocular surveillance visited upon it by the larger Chicanx community, as well as the formally straight conditions of traditional archive-building, museum institutions, and the art world writ large. With a focus on works by Mundo Meza (1955-85), Teddy Sandoval (1949-1995), and Joey Terrill (1955- ), and with appearances by Laura Aguilar, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, and even Eddie Murphy, Archiving an Epidemic composes a complex picture of queer Chicanx avant-gardisms. With over sixty images--many of which are published here for the first time--Hernández's work excavates this archive to question not what Chicanx art is, but what it could have been.
What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood by Rigoberto González
Call Number: PS3557.O4695 Z46 2018
ISBN: 0299316904
Publication Date: 2018-03-13
*At Young Research Library.
Burdened by poverty, illiteracy, and vulnerability as Mexican immigrants to California's Coachella Valley, three generations of González men turn to vices or withdraw into depression. As brothers Rigoberto and Alex grow to manhood, they are haunted by the traumas of their mother's early death, their lonely youth, their father's desertion, and their grandfather's invective. Rigoberto's success in escaping--first to college and then by becoming a writer--is blighted by his struggles with alcohol and abusive relationships, while Alex contends with difficult family relations, his own rocky marriage, and fatherhood. Descending into a dark emotional space that compromises their mental and physical health, the brothers eventually find hope in aiding each other. This is an honest and revealing window into the complexities of Latino masculinity, the private lives of men, and the ways they build strength under the weight of grief, loss, and despair.
Mean by Myriam Gurba
Call Number: PS3607.U5485 Z46 2017
ISBN: 1566894913
Publication Date: 2017-11-07
True crime, memoir, and ghost story, Mean is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba's coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. Blending radical formal fluidity and caustic humor, Gurba takes on sexual violence, small towns, and race, turning what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy. This is a confident, intoxicating, brassy book that takes the cost of sexual assault, racism, misogyny, and homophobia deadly seriously.
Pathways of Desire: The Sexual Migration of Mexican Gay Men by Héctor Carrillo
Call Number: HQ76.2.M6 C37 2017
ISBN: 022651773X
Publication Date: 2018-01-09
With Pathways of Desire, Héctor Carrillo brings us into the lives of Mexican gay men who have left their home country to pursue greater sexual autonomy and sexual freedom in the United States. The groundbreaking ethnographic study brings our attention to the full arc of these men's migration experiences, from their upbringing in Mexican cities and towns, to their cross-border journeys, to their incorporation into urban gay communities in American cities, and their sexual and romantic relationships with American men. These men's diverse and fascinating stories demonstrate the intertwining of sexual, economic, and familial motivations for migration. Further, Carrillo shows that sexual globalization must be regarded as a bidirectional, albeit uneven, process of exchange between countries in the global north and the global south. With this approach, Carrillo challenges the view that gay men from countries like Mexico would logically want to migrate to a "more sexually enlightened" country like the United States--a partial and limited understanding, given the dynamic character of sexuality in countries such as Mexico, which are becoming more accepting of sexual diversity. Pathways of Desire also provides a helpful analytical framework for the simultaneous consideration of structural and cultural factors in social scientific studies of sexuality. Carrillo explains the patterns of cross-cultural interaction that sexual migration generates and--at the most practical level--shows how the intricacies of cross-cultural sexual and romantic relations may affect the sexual health and HIV risk of transnational immigrant populations.
An Examination of Latinx LGBT Populations Across the United States by Antonio (Jay) Pastrana, Jr.; Juan Battle; Angelique Harris
Call Number: HQ76.3.U5 P38 2017
ISBN: 1137560738
Publication Date: 2015-11-30
This book utilizes personal narratives and survey data from over 1,100 respondents to explore the diversity of experiences across Latinx LGBT communities within the United States, including Puerto Rico. The authors document and celebrate many of the everyday strengths and strategies employed by this extraordinary population to navigate and negotiate their daily lives.
Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism by Uriel Quesada (Editor); Letitia Gomez (Editor); Salvador Vidal-Ortiz (Editor)
Call Number: HQ76.8.U5 Q44 2015
ISBN: 1477307303
Publication Date: 2015-09-01
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, LGBT Latinas/os faced several forms of discrimination. The greater Latino community did not often accept sexual minorities, and the mainstream LGBT movement expected everyone, regardless of their ethnic and racial background, to adhere to a specific set of priorities so as to accommodate a "unified" agenda. To disrupt the cycle of sexism, racism, and homophobia that they experienced, LGBT Latinas/os organized themselves on local, state, and national levels, forming communities in which they could fight for equal rights while simultaneously staying true to both their ethnic and sexual identities. Yet histories of LGBT activism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s often reduce the role that Latinas/os played, resulting in misinformation, or ignore their work entirely, erasing them from history. Queer Brown Voices is the first book published to counter this trend, documenting the efforts of some of these LGBT Latina/o activists. Comprising essays and oral history interviews that present the experiences of fourteen activists across the United States and in Puerto Rico, the book offers a new perspective on the history of LGBT mobilization and activism. The activists discuss subjects that shed light not only on the organizations they helped to create and operate, but also on their broad-ranging experiences of being racialized and discriminated against, fighting for access to health care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and struggling for awareness.
A Cup of Water under My Bed by Daisy Hernandez
Call Number: CT275.H5862453 A3 2014
ISBN: 0807014486
Publication Date: 2014-09-09
*At Powell Library. In this lyrical, coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race. These lessons--rooted in women's experiences of migration, colonization, y cariño--define in evocative detail what it means to grow up female in an immigrant home. In prose that is both memoir and commentary, Daisy reflects on reporting for the New York Times as the paper is rocked by the biggest plagiarism scandal in its history and plunged into debates about the role of race in the newsroom. A heartfelt exploration of family, identity, and language, A Cup of Water Under My Bed is ultimately a daughter's story of finding herself and her community, and of creating a new, queer life.
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings by Juana María Rodríguez
Call Number: HQ76.3.U5 R633 2014
ISBN: 0814764924
Publication Date: 2014-07-25
[At Young Research Library.] Finalist for the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings proposes a theory of sexual politics that works in the interstices between radical queer desires and the urgency of transforming public policy, between utopian longings and everyday failures. Rodríguez examines not only how projections of racialized sex erupt onto various discursive mediums but also how the confluence of racial and gendered anxieties seeps into the gestures and utterances of sexual acts, kinship structures, and activist practices. Ultimately, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings reveals --in lyrical style and explicit detail--how sex has been deployed in contemporary queer communities in order to radically reconceptualize sexual politics.
*Also available as an eBook (UC users only): Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings
Oye Loca: From the Mariel Boatlift to Gay Cuban Miami by Susana Peña
Call Number: HQ76.2.U52 M5257 2013
ISBN: 0816665540
Publication Date: 2013-08-16
During only a few months in 1980, 125,000 Cubans entered the United States as part of a massive migration known as the Mariel boatlift. The images of boats of all sizes, in various conditions, filled with Cubans of all colors and ages, triggered a media storm. Fleeing Cuba's repressive government, many homosexual men and women arrived in the United States only to face further obstacles. Deemed "undesirables" by the U.S. media, the Cuban state, and Cuban Americans already living in Miami, these new entrants marked a turning point in Miami's Cuban American and gay histories. In Oye Loca, Susana Peña investigates a moment of cultural collision. Drawing from first-person stories of Cuban Americans as well as government documents and cultural texts from both the United States and Cuba, Peña reveals how these discussions both sensationalized and silenced the gay presence, giving way to a Cuban American gay culture. Through an examination of the diverse lives of Cuban and Cuban American gay men, we learn that Miami's gay culture was far from homogeneous. By way of in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival analysis, Peña shows that the men who crowded into small apartments together, bleached their hair with peroxide, wore housedresses in the street, and endured ruthless insults challenged what it meant to be Cuban in Miami. Making a critical incision through the study of heteronormativity, homosexualities, and racialization, ultimately Oye Loca illustrates how a single historical event helped shape the formation of an entire ethnic and sexual landscape.
Autobiography of My Hungers by Rigoberto González
Call Number: PS3557.O4695 Z46 2013
ISBN: 0299292509
Publication Date: 2013-05-06
*At Young Research Library.
Rigoberto González, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, takes a second piercing look at his past through a startling new lens: hunger. The need for sustenance originating in childhood poverty, the adolescent emotional need for solace and comfort, the adult desire for a larger world, another lover, a different body--all are explored by González in a series of heartbreaking and poetic vignettes. Each vignette is a defining moment of self-awareness, every moment an important step in a lifelong journey toward clarity, knowledge, and the nourishment that comes in various forms--even "the smallest biggest joys" help piece together a complex portrait of a gay man of color who at last defines himself by what he learns, not by what he yearns for.
Viva Records, 1970-2000: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles by Robb Hernandez
Call Number: N11 .V58 2013
ISBN: 0895511495
Publication Date: 2013-07-17
Robert Hernandez traces the history and assesses the impact of VIVA! Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists, a nonprofit artists' coalition founded in 1987 in the Silverlake community of Los Angeles. Their aim was to increase the representation of lesbian Latina and gay Latino artists in the LA art scene. VIVA! sponsored exhibitions, theatrical performances, and educational outreach. It worked closely with other gay and lesbian organizations in Los Angeles, using arts-based projects to address cultural and sociopolitcal issues that were of concern to their community and the AIDS crisis in particuar. The first organization of its kind in Los Angeles, VIVA! offered a stage and a voice for artists who had been routinely marginalized. The VIVA! collection of papers is housed at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. It includes administrative papers, photographs, artwork, VIVA! publications, and documents related to the organization's exhibitions, performances, educational projects, and other events.
Amigas y Amantes: Sexually Nonconforming Latinas Negotiate Family by Katie L. Acosta
Call Number: HQ75.53 .A28 2013
ISBN: 0813561957
Publication Date: 2013-10-30
"Amigas y Amantes" (Friends and Lovers) explores the experiences of sexually nonconforming Latinas in the creation and maintenance of families. It is based on forty-two in-depth ethnographic interviews with women who identify as lesbian, bisexual, or queer (LBQ). Additionally, it draws from fourteen months of participant observation at LBQ Latina events that Katie L. Acosta conducted in 2007 and 2008 in a major northeast city. With this data, Acosta examines how LBQ Latinas manage loving relationships with the families who raised them, and with their partners, their children, and their friends. Acosta investigates how sexually nonconforming Latinas negotiate cultural expectations, combat compulsory heterosexuality, and reconcile tensions with their families. She offers a new way of thinking about the emotion work involved in everyday lives, which highlights the informal, sometimes invisible, labor required in preserving family ties. Acosta contends that the work LBQ Latinas take on to preserve connections with biological families, lovers, and children results in a unique way of doing family.Paying particular attention to the negotiations that LBQ Latinas undertake in an effort to maintain familial order, "Amigas y Amantes" explores how they understand femininity, how they negotiate their religious faiths, how they face the unique challenges of being in interracial/interethnic relationships, and how they raise their children while integrating their families of origin.
A Xicana codex of changing consciousness : writings, 2000-2010 by Cherríe L. Moraga
Call Number: PS153.M4 M673 2011
ISBN: 0822349779
Publication Date: 2011
Compañeros : Latino activists in the face of AIDS by Jesus Ramirez-Valles
Call Number: HQ76.8.U5 R36 2011
ISBN: 0252078217
Publication Date: 2011
Gay Latino studies : a critical reader by edited by Michael Hames-García and Ernesto Javier Martínez
Call Number: HQ76.3.U5 G376 2011
ISBN: 0822349558
Tacit subjects : belonging and same-sex desire among Dominican immigrant men by Carlos Ulises Decena
Call Number: F128.9.D6 D333 2011
ISBN: 0822349450

LGBT Latinos/Latinas, 1990 - 2009

Queer Ricans : cultures and sexualities in the diaspora by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Call Number: HQ76.3.U5 L3 2009
ISBN: 0816640920
Queer Latino testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza : hard tails by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé
Call Number: HQ75.8.R58 C78 2007
ISBN: 140397747X
Butterfly boy : memories of a Chicano mariposa by Rigoberto González
Call Number: PS3557.O4695 Z46 2006
ISBN: 0299219003
*At Young Research Library and College Library.
Queer latinidad : identity practices, discursive spaces by Juana Maria Rodriguez
Call Number: HQ76.3.U5 R63 2003
ISBN: 0814775500
Tortilleras : Hispanic and U.S. Latina lesbian expression by edited by Lourdes Torres and Inmaculada Pertusa
Call Number: PQ7081.5 .T68 2003
ISBN: 1592130070
Waiting in the wings : portrait of a queer motherhood by Cherríe Moraga (1997)
Call Number: HQ759 .M8617 1997
ISBN: 1563410923
*At Young Research Library, College Library, SRLF & Chicano Studies Research Center Library.
Chicana lesbians : the girls our mothers warned us about by edited by Carla Trujillo
Call Number: HQ75.6.U5 C53 1991
ISBN: 094321906X
*At College Library and Chicano Studies Research Center Library.

Films

Unidad: Gay & Lesbian Latinos Unidos. (Gregorio Davila, Roland Palencia, Mario J. Novoa, 2022). "GLLU was the greater Los Angeles area’s first major Queer Latin@ organization, and the film chronicles events surrounding GLLU at a pivotal time in the history of LGBTQ equality, women’s rights, and civil rights movements that shaped the destinies of GLLU’s communities for decades to come." Film website.

Forbidden: Undocumented and Queer in Rural America. Moises Serrano, Heather Mathews & Tiffany Rhynard (Sisters Unite Productions & Pony Pictures, 2016). Streaming via Kanopy (UCLA only); film website. "Gay and Undocumented, Moises Serrano Fights for Justice."

El Canto del Colibrí (Song of the Hummingbird). Marco Castro-Bojorquez (Frameline, 2015). A documentary about Latino fathers and their LGBTQ children. DVD HQ755.85 .C353 2015; Film information. Also streaming via Kanopy (UCLA only).

I am the Queen. Henrique Cirre-Lima, Josue Pellot (Cinema Libre Studio, 2010). Streaming via Kanopy (UCLA only); film website. "A celebration of Chicago's Puerto Rican transgender community."

Tal Como Somos = Just As We Are. Directed and produced by Judith McCray; co-director and producer, Heidi Zerzen. (Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 2008) DVD HQ76.3.U5 T35 2008

De colores: Lesbianas y gays latinos: historias de valor, familia y amor = Lesbian and gay latinos: stories of strength, family and love. Producer, Peter Barbosa; directors, Peter Barbosa & Garrett Lenoir. (Jaebee Productions, 2001). Included on Unlearning homophobia series (WomanVision, 2004). DVD HQ76.8.U5 U55 2004

The Salt Mines. Susana Aikin, Carlos Aparicio (Frameline, 1990). "Latina transwomen in New York." Streaming via Kanopy (UCLA only); film trailer; film information.

Dissertations

Voices from the margins: experiences of racial and sexual identity construction for urban Latino youth. Glenda Alemán. (UCLA, Education, 2005) LD791.9.E22 A367 2005 *At SRLF.

Communities of desire: queer Latina/Latino history and memory, San Francisco Bay Area, 1960s-1990s. Horacio Nelson Roque Ramirez. (2001) HQ76.3.U52 R66 2001 *At SRLF.

Chicana feminist voices: in search of Chicana lesbian voices from Aztlán to cyberspace. Lisa Justine Hernandez. (2001) PS153.H56 H47 2001 *At Chicano Studies Research Center Library.

Williams Institute Reading Room: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resources in Law and Public Policy: LGBT Latinos/Latinas