Search

The decades between 1970-1990 witnessed a crystallization of political whiteness and white supremacy in San Diego County, especially at its epicenter in Fallbrook, California. What came to be known as the white power movement developed an explicitly anti-Mexican racial policy based on violence as part of a declared race war. This microhistory focuses on the racial formation that transpired among Fallbrook’s white and Mexican communities during the latter quarter of the twenty-century.

Feeling Close investigates how contemporary cultural productions by queer and trans of color subjects reveal the reparative potentials of ordinary forms of closeness (physical proximity and/or emotional intimacy) with others. I show how acts of closeness that fill the daily lives of gender- and sexual-variant subjects of color open up experiences of spacetime that exceed colonial logics and illuminate reparative and life-sustaining modes of togetherness. I offer a method of close reading and intersectional comparatist cultural critique that shows how attention to the minutiae of lived, embodied experience brings into relief the strategies queer and trans of color subjects use to challenge hegemonic knowledge systems. My comparatist approach centers the solidarities between U.S.-based gender- and sexual-variant Filipinx and Chicanx artists and writers to demonstrate how queer and trans of color subjects’ routine contestations of colonial meaning-making and power structures illuminate otherwise unintelligible possibilities for cross-ethnic coalition. Centering literature, performance, and visual culture from the 1990s to the present, I study how sensations of physical and/or emotional closeness located within queer and trans of color everyday life disrupt dominant orderings of the world to reimagine spacetime and relationality. Each chapter pairs works by Filipinx and Chicanx cultural producers and focuses on a distinct artistic medium. Chapter 1 argues that Aurora Guerrero’s and Isabel Sandoval’s respective independent narrative films, Mosquita y Mari and Lingua Franca, depict quotidian practices through which undocumented queer and trans femme characters feel the bodies of those out of reach. It rethinks the ordinary sexual act, edging, proposing it as an analytic and strategy rooted in erotics that reveals other ways of feeling close to others across spatiotemporal locations. Chapter 2 reads R. Zamora Linmark’s novel, Rolling the R’s, alongside Rigoberto González’s memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa. It demonstrates how sensations of stickiness illuminate minoritarian configurations of geography, memory, history, and development. Chapter 3 analyzes Xandra Ibarra’s and Kiam Marcelo Junio’s respective artworks, Nude Laughing and American Karaoke. It proposes that these pieces employ corniness to critique western aesthetics and reconfigure relationalities between the viewing subject and the subject on view.

This research analyzes the oral histories of five Chicanx students and their educational experiences in the Los Angeles Unified School District between the years 1950 and 1969. By using Anzaldúa’s (1967) theory of Nepantla, I analyze how Chicanx students experienced the complexities of belonging to multiple identities, languages, and cultures in the United States. Specifically, this study analyzes how educational spaces marginalized and oppressed Chicanx individuals who entered educational spaces speaking Spanish. In this oral history analysis I demonstrate, first, that K-12 educational institutions promoted language ideologies that deemed Chicanx speakers as deficient and in need of remediation through schooling practices that attempted to eradicate their linguistic repertoires. Second, I demonstrate that schooling practices, such as the segregation and the racialization of the Spanish language, led Chicanx students to question their identity as Mexican Americans living in the United States, resulting in school spaces feeling like a place of alienation for them. Last, I demonstrate that Chicanx students were able to resist and reclaim their identities by creating spaces of belonging through community uplifting efforts. Collectively, the efforts of Chicanx communities led to a movement that reconstructed Spanish speakers’ home language and culture as an asset, ultimately enhancing students’ educational experiences and awareness of discriminatory school practices. This research reiterates the importance of embracing the intersection of identities that Students of Color enter schooling spaces with, while simultaneously acknowledging that identities are not rigid social constructs. The implications of this research is to connect Chicanx history to the present to ensure that the efforts of Chicanx in the 1950’s and 1960’s are recognized and that the same linguistically and culturally oppressive practices are not repeated in today’s educational practices.

This dissertation, “Forma, lo performativo, acción poética: Poetic Art’s Critiques of—and Alternatives to—an Americas of Conquest,” takes a comparative approach to the long history of poetic-artistic form in the Americas, together with an analysis rooted in traditions of Frankfurt-School critical aesthetics, in order to propose an alternative genealogy for the emergence of various modern experimentalisms. From the vantage point of the current fiftieth anniversary of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War (though not limited to that moment alone), “Forma, lo performativo, acción poética” examines a broad range of texts from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries to investigate the development of divergent yet still fundamentally related poetic experimentalisms across the Americas. Whereas existing models of trans-American comparative criticism often foreground essentialist notions of experience and identity to produce the historical “grounds” for comparison, my work builds upon Left-Kantian- and Frankfurt School-based notions of critical aesthetics to explore the performative and thus sociopolitical aspects of artistic form itself. Underscoring the primacy of form as critically reflective aesthetic illusion-experience, I unveil the ways that poets and artists have registered and sought to imaginatively contest the realities of colonial capitalism since the advent of European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. I thereby begin to argue that there exists a still unrecognized history of poetic-artistic form itself operating as anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-heterosexist critique of oppressive systems of thought and action in what I deem an “Americas of Conquest.”“Forma, lo performativo, acción poética” sets forth the preliminary mapping of the story of poetic art’s formal and substantive contestations of power in the Americas. I look at genre, tropes, and formal conventions that bring poetry to the doorsteps of politics. It begins by examining how enslaved African-American poet Phillis Wheatley and Colonial Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz each made use of the dream-vision genre’s narrative framing device to register critiques of the racist and heterosexist ideologies shaping their worlds. From that Colonial-period prelude I move to examine the experiments of nineteenth- through twenty first-century poets and artists to initiate discussion of the politicized and nominally depoliticized modes of artistic rebellion their work employs. My aim, in doing so, is to underscore that the story this dissertation only begins to tell involves a nineteenth- through twenty-first century narrative, one that senses within it prior histories of poetic form as critique in ways that go as far back as the colonial encounter itself. I thereby proceed to reconsider, for example, the art experiments of the Civil Rights-era Chicanx art collective Asco (Spanish for “disgust”) and the 1970s, Pinochet dictatorship-era Chilean art collective Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA). Thereafter, I look to the forms of acción poética that contemporary poet-artists experiment with, specifically in the work of figures like Emmy Pérez, Rafa Esparza, and Harry Gamboa Jr. While the historical framework of this dissertation might seem arbitrarily overextended, it nonetheless constitutes a necessary experiment that allows me to examine the ways in which poetic form, through its own historical unfolding in the Americas (starting with figures like Sor Juana and Wheatley), begins to register and critique the systems of thought and action that enable and sustain colonization, socioeconomic exploitation, and political oppression in the Americas.“Forma, lo performativo, acción poética” seeks to enhance debates on Chicanx/Latinx literature and culture as well as on global modernism. By foregrounding the work of Chicanx/Latinx poets and artists while situating their work within a global context, this dissertation underscores the contributions Latinxs have made to modern trans-American literary culture while at the same time embracing, contesting, or entering in dialogue with Eurocentric histories of modernism. Finally, this dissertation highlights the impact of literary and artistic cultures on social transformation processes, contending that avant-garde poets and artists from the geo-social peripheries have cultivated some of the most radical and egalitarian artistic visions of the future.

This dissertation examines the aesthetic phenomenon of camp in the work of the East LosAngeles-based art group, Asco. Founded by Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón,III, and Patssi Valdez in the early 1970s, Asco produced a distinct blend of conceptualand performance-based art, which they exhibited in alternative art spaces and distributedas correspondence art. The group’s name, which means “nausea” in Spanish, speaks tothe sensation their often provocative and politically motivated art ostensibly produces.The basis of this reaction lies in the stark contrast of Asco’s work to established Chicanoart that emerged during the Chicano Movement.I organize my study through a consideration of each of Asco’s camp targets, or theobjects of their critiques. These include the exploitation and oppression of the Chicanocommunity, the limitations and liberation in Chicano muralism, and the glamour andbiases of Hollywood. Each of these denote cultures and movements with which the youngartists were enamored as well as alienated from in a complex insider/outsider relationshipthat enables camp critique.Through analysis of Gronk’s proto-Asco performance Caca-Roaches Have No Friends(1969), I establish a clear foundation for camp that corresponds to Moe Meyer’s assertionthat camp is a specifically queer tactic of disidentification. I refer to the infamouslyprovocative scene in Gronk's play starring Cyclona (Robert Legorreta) as horror drag toemphasize the intended camp target: homophobia within the Chicano community.Through a investigation of Asco’s early street performances and No Movies I furtherdemonstrate that Asco uses Chicano rasquache and domesticana tactics, as described byTomas Ybarra Frausto and Amalia Mesa-Bains respectively, in order to critique Chicanoand Anglo-American cultures. Asco deploys these three aesthetic tactics to challengeproblematizing identifiers of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class.

This dissertation aims to actively approach melodramatic Latinx/Mexican productions as cultural manifestations of a political movement that not only pushes the proverbial envelope towards post-queer-identity (that is post the coming out climax of many works) by demanding the recognition of explicit queer sexuality as a powerful tool that can and does invoke change in the cultural and social realm. Sácala (del closet) theorizes what I am calling unapologetic raw queer sexualities, which I see manifested in Latin American and Latinx cultural productions. I pay close attention to the transnational connections and influences not only between the neighboring countries of México and the US but also in global conversations with sexual identities in Latin America. The works I engage in my dissertations include the 1983 novel titled Melodrama by Luis Zapata. I suggest that Melodrama is both an homage and a parody of the melodramatic genre in Mexican Golden Age cinema and how the novel ultimately destabilizes fixed notions of gender and sexuality that impact both straight and queer understandings of body, identity, and desire. In Chapter 2, I work with performances by El Mariachi Arcoris de Los Angeles by analyzing the different ways in which the queer mariachi queers spaces and dares to reimagine what it means to be queer and what it means to unsettle patriarchal, heteronormative frameworks that are historically associated not only with Latinx culture and Chicanx activism but indeed socially pervasive across the different ethnic groups that make up the United States of America. The following chapter analyzes Netflix's La casa de las flores (2018), an original series entangled with Mexican melodrama, particularly stemming from telenovelas, that relate directly to queer world making issues as I pay attention to US notions of sexual identities that are appropriated by non-US subjects as well as the different forms in which these subjectivities exceed theoretical imagining of transnational queer (re)formation with a visibly queer sexuality. Lastly, I analyze Tangerine as an audiovisual project which allows the viewer to experience -with limitations- sexual otherness while questioning notions of Latinx family.

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Colonizing and Decolonizing Latinidad with American TheatreBy Ricardo Ernesto RochaDoctor of Philosophy in Theatre and DramaUniversity of California, Irvine, 2019Professor Daphne Lei, ChairThis study examines representations of Latinidad in American theatre that depict California’s mid-nineteenth-century, colonial transformation from a Mexican state to a US state. Conflicts between Anglo Americans and LatinXs, or individuals of Latin American decent, were sharpened by theatrical illusions of Latinidad, or Latin American culture at large, that portrayed of people of color as backward and vicious. Magical materialism is introduced as a theoretical framework to examine ideological constructions in American theatre that incite the containment and positionality of LatinXs. Theatre facilitated the dispossession of (land) resources from LatinX populations with racial fictions, as assessed with "Joaquín Murieta de Castillo, The Celebrated California Bandit" by Charles E.B. Howe (1858), via David Belasco’s "The Rose of the Rancho" (1906), and with the theatre diaries of Florence Hellman who witnessed Belasco’s Broadway production in 1907. These American plays provide dominant spectatorship with what Patrocinio Schweickart terms a positive hermeneutic for a utopian, Anglo-dominant paradigm. Mid-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century formations of magical materialism reveals an antagonistic empathy for LatinXs that has manufactured their ontological status in the US. El Teatro Campesino’s 1981 adaptation of Belasco’s "The Rose of the Rancho" in San Juan Bautista, California, is explored as a cultural decolonizing production through its determination to give voice and interpretive power to LatinXs—a negative hermeneutic that dismantles colonial constructions of gender and race. As a bold contribution to American theatre, El Teatro’s adaptation embraces omnipresent LatinX interpreters and criticism to create theatre not reliant on magical materialist practices.

Attention to family relationships in work by Chicanas and Latinas reveals mothers as paramount figures to a daughter’s identity formation. Mothers may serve as gatekeepers of patriarchy and also as a daughter’s closest female role model—as a result, mother-daughter relationships may also be source of deep ambivalence. The literary and cultural study I undertake in this dissertation examines how Chicanas and Latinas find their voice through asking difficult questions of both their mothers and of the institutions that guide them. The primary texts I examine are foundational to the development of Chicana literature, feminism, and cultural criticism since the 1980’s, and take into account a spectrum of mother/daughter experiences. This work considers how daughters discover their voice through and against their mothers, and how self-expression on the page and on the cultural stage are necessary sites for creation and articulation of a daughter’s agency.

Across the US, Chicana/o and Latina/o murals have served as artistic landmarks commemorating Chicana/o and Latina/o culture, history and identity. These murals, however, are predominantly heteronormative representations of Chicana/o culture and history. What happens, therefore, when queer Latinx and Chicanx artists use muralism to express their intersectional identities? This project focuses on the digital queer mural, Por Vida, designed by Los Angeles based artist Paul Manuel, installed June 13, 2015 on 24th and Bryant Street in San Francisco’s Mission District in celebration of Pride Month. Just days after its installation, the mural was defaced multiple times, three times spray-painted, the fourth time incinerated. After the defacements, community tensions rose among local and non-local Mission District residents. To this day, the identity of individual(s) behind the violent vandalism are still unknown.In this project, I explore what I identify as the “contested conversations” regarding Por Vida’s defacements between local and non-local residents. From over 230 Instagram comments, I identify five different types of arguments within these online conversations which include, 1) Cultural Gatekeepers of "The Cholo" 2) Spatial Entitlement 3) Gentrification Activism 4) Pro-LGBTQ and 5) Latinx Pro-LGBTQ. Drawing from queer of color critique, spatial theory, whiteness studies, and women of color feminism, I explore these contested debates, along with the Mission District’s cultural and spatial relationship to Por Vida’s installation. Using this analytics lens, I highlight and challenge the pervasive forms of whiteness in mainstream LGBTQ representation that, I argue, ultimately erase queer of color identities or “brown” pride (Mu�oz). Rainbow capitalism is a racial social project that informs spatial imaginations, producing territorial boundaries (cultural and spatial) that intentionally exclude queer of color bodies. I argue that the censorship of the Por Vida mural reinforces rainbow capitalism’s project of erasure–a project reaffirming queerness as a social identity belonging only to that of white, wealthier queer subjects. Indeed, I aim to question the “gentrification argument,” pointing to instead the white gay subject’s universal or dominant socio-spatial relationship to queer of color bodies and claims to safe spaces such as “gayborhoods.” Through a queer of color spatial critique, I discovered that the anti-gentrification sentiments from local Mission District residents, while they openly resist against the displacement of low-income families of color, also simultaneously observe Por Vida’s representation of queer of color intimacy as a symptom of gentrification. Interviews revealed that these sentiments are rooted in homophobic and transphobic attitudes but also territorial entitlements that continuously marginalize queer and trans bodies of color. I argue that Por Vida’s representation of queer Latinx intimacy is an active disruption to public space’s heteronormative social values of respectability and domesticity, that also render visible the pervasive homophobic and transphobic attitudes still informing Latina/o communities even as they support anti-racist, anti-displacement activism.

This dissertation explores the early and influential works of Chicana feminist authors Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherríe Moraga through the lens of modern genre theory. Despite the tendency of these authors to write in multiple genres and hybrid forms, much of the scholarly response has focused on the new perspectives and experiences present in the texts rather than on their formal innovation. I contend innovative content should be considered inextricable from innovative form. These authors do not merely offer new perspectives but offer new ways of presenting ideas. Socially constructed and culturally embedded, genre operates at the level of meaning-making, purveys dominant ideology, and shapes interpretation. Given the subtle yet influential role of genre, the resistance to traditional genre in Chicana writings must be understood as challenging both literary and social norms. Because no text performs or transgresses genre in the exactly same way, there is no single theory or methodology which applies. Rather, an attentiveness to genre in texts and scholarship exposes the influence of genre in our understanding of texts. This dissertation traces genre history and its frequent borrowing of racial metaphors to illustrate logics of genre purity and reads Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and its refusal to perform traditional genre as resistance essential to Anzaldúa’s theorizing of mestiza consciousness, a framework based on embracing racial miscegenation. Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street provides the opportunity to explore genre indeterminacy and to examine Bildungsroman as a genre case study where the origins and centuries-long debates make the constructedness of genre visible. In Moraga’s Loving in the War Years and the co-edited anthology This Bridge Called My Back, I examine the innovation to the autobiography and anthology genres as well as the genre-related trends in scholarship, considering the consistently significant, if not always obvious, role of genre in shaping interpretation and analysis. The writings of Anzaldúa, Cisneros, and Moraga have changed the literary landscape, but only when genre is part of the analysis can the fullness of their innovation and literary legacy be glimpsed.

ABSTRACT“It Was NEVER Fiction:” The Decolonized Voice of Michele SerrosbyAdrianna Marie Bayer SimoneClare Hemmings’ Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011) posits three types of narratives—progress, loss, and return. She argues that all stories fall into one of these categories, with the most desired ones existing as return narratives. I argue that Hemmings does not account for decolonial stories and that an additional type of narrative is needed. As a decolonized voice, Chicana author Michele Serros embodies an ambiguous and transformative form of storytelling. I liken it to a DNA helix with multiple layers and threads that connect in a continuum of space and time. I critically analyze Serros’ writing conventions, such as her confessional and often autobiographical undertones, as techniques that illuminate new ways of understanding race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Her most well-known books, How to Be a Chicana Role Model (2000) and Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity, and Oxnard (1997), offer poems, essays, and short stories that exemplify a decolonized voice. I critically analyze major themes from these books, such as the term “role model,” and show how a decolonized voice expands one’s understandings about ideologies. I utilize Anzaldúa’s theory from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (2007) and essays from This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 1981-2001 (2002) as a form of archeological reading for literature that is “theory in the flesh”—the lived reality of a person’s life presented as fiction. I supplement the notions of embodied literature with somatic theory to demonstrate how Serros’ mind and body offer counter stories to hegemonic ones. A decolonized voice is a significant contribution to academic theory because it is a new way of writing, reading, and analyzing stories. This work combines theoretical analyses, oral histories derived from several interviews with the author, and interdisciplinary methodologies used to create a dynamic approach to understanding Chicanx and Latinx literature. A diverse methodological approach creates the space for a decolonial analysis that is untethered and nonconformist, which illuminates a new way of understanding literature and society.

As academic institutions and archivists around the nation grapple with the question of how to address existing monuments to racist histories at their institutions, how can archivists support the creation of new monuments on college and university campuses that reflect suppressed or oppressed histories of people of color? This case study explores the Los Seis de Boulder Sculpture Project, a socially engaged art project at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), in which archivists in the CU Boulder Libraries' Archives supported and collaborated with a student artist and community members to create a public monument commemorating the deaths of six Chicano Movement activists and students in car bombs in May 1974. This study explores how such archivist/artist collaborations can be rooted in the social justice responsibilities of archivists and outlines the practical steps that the collaborators followed to create and sustain their work together and, ultimately, the long-term placement of the monument on campus. It also discusses the mutual, positive benefits that both the Archives and the artist received by working with one another and offers considerations and lessons learned for other archivist/artist collaborators who wish to work together on similar projects at public institutions.

Increasing diverse author representation within medical librarianship scholarship among BIPOC information professionals is an important endeavor that requires closer examination. This commentary looks to examine the ways in which the profession can support Latinx librarians and library workers in fully participating within the scholarly pipeline by exploring our unique and authentic voices, structural barriers, hesitation and fears, Whiteness in the profession and knowledge production, bias in the peer review process, lack of resources and support, and finally, a call to action.

This essay examines Gloria Anzald&uacute, a&rsquo, s critical appropriation of two Mexican philosophers in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera: Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz. We argue that although neither of these authors is cited in her seminal work, Anzald&uacute, a had them both in mind through the writing process and that their ideas are present in the text itself. Through a genealogical reading of Borderlands/La Frontera, and aided by archival research, we demonstrate how Anzald&uacute, s philosophical vision of the &ldquo, new mestiza&rdquo, is a critical continuation of the broader tradition known as la filosof&iacute, a de lo mexicano, which flourished during a golden age of Mexican philosophy (1910&ndash, 1960). Our aim is to open new directions in Latinx and Latin American philosophy by presenting Anzald&uacute, s Borderlands/La Frontera as a profound scholarly encounter with two classic works of Mexican philosophy, Ramos&rsquo, Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico and Paz&rsquo, s The Labyrinth of Solitude.

To date no sociological investigation has explored the role of translation in shaping the US Chicanx identity. This thesis will help fill this gap by investigating how the Chicanx author Gloria E. Anzald��a problematized the connection national literature/monolingualism through the creation of a type of multilingual text in which the wall between translation and original disappears and which I propose to term Unwalled Text. By carefully analyzing the form of an unwalled text, this thesis argues that we can understand how such text works as a mirror of the political, social, economic, and cultural components that define one���s own minorized identity. Thus, this thesis proves that the concept of identity is an inextricable aspect that breathes in and through the use of specific textual forms. And so, this innovative study of unwalled texts has the potential to (i) advance future research on translation studies and (ii) contribute to redefine US��� dominant monolingual identities by tracing parallelisms regarding the use of translation as a tool for identity representation between Chicanx and all the displaced translingual communities that undoubtedly contribute to the intercultural nature of today���s society.