UC Santa Cruz

Building on women of color feminists' frameworks that engage the complexities of race, class, gender, and sexuality, "Tracing Queer Latina Diasporas: Escarvando Historical Narratives of Ancestries and Silences" analyzes historical, literary, sociological, as well as other ethnic studies and feminist studies scholarship, and uses methods such as oral history and archival research next to analysis of visual representations, art, and museum visits that together map out an emerging analytic interpretive frame to trace queer Latina discourses of creativity and knowledge. Tracing the diasporas of "queer borderlands" highlights the forced migrations and colonizing of Latinas/os and Latin American communities. By racing the "queer" and queering the "Latina/o," the tensions and dialogues manifested in these historically diasporic and transnational identities and communities can be traced.

This project examines the often over looked yet intertwined legacies of Chicana feminisms and queer theory through the work of lesbian of color and queer women of color feminist formations. Tracing silences of non-heteronormative populations of color is a move to address colonial forms of epistemic violence. The chapters in this dissertation form archives to address the overarching question: How do women of color feminists knowledge production, decolonized methodologies, and representations of cultural memory assist in tracing and remembering hidden histories and silences of queer Latina/o ancestries?

Chapter one, "Decolonizing Aztlán: Unraveling Conflicting Colonial Histories of Land and Race to Trace Queer Ancestry" is a historical account that disrupts the usual story of colonization that is central to Chicano studies and instead searches for connections of race and land and complexities of gender and sexuality to open space for the exploration of queer ancestral histories. This chapter complicates the historical racial formation of the Mexican American through an analysis of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Chapter two, "Gloria Anzaldúa: Altars, Archives, and Opening up the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands" argues that Anzaldúa's classic text is an altar that functions as a guide for creativity and ceremony. Through a grounded analysis of racism and colonization, Anzaldúa opens an analysis of decolonization that includes gender, sexuality, and spirituality.

Chapter three, "Queer Latina Cultural Production: Remembering through Oral and Visual Storytelling" focuses on queer Latina and Indígena artists who use enact forms of remembering through their art (i.e. sculpture, film, theater, and painting) to regain cultural ancestral memory and story. The fusion and collaborative methodology of this work is reflective of feminist of color knowledges. While chapter four, "Tracing Latina Lesbiana Historias of Resistance, Solidarity, and Visibility" purports the importance of an early generation and network of women of color who did the work to construct visual archives in various forms, such as the production of anthologies, building archives, and documenting through photography, as a mode of establishing visibility for Latina Lesbiana in community and academic spaces.