This dissertation examines Latina/o/x young adults’ interactions with law as they navigate and create meaning out of the invasive bureaucratic process of legalization through marriage. I draw on three years of participant observation between 2016 and 2020 and longitudinal interviews with 36 heterosexual and LGBTQ young adults in Southern California. I argue that for young adults the intersecting mechanism of illegalization and regularization produce a challenging entry into legality and imprint negative effects on their intimate lives and legal incorporation. In Chapter Two, I theorize constricted agency as young adults’ negotiation and enactment of restricted actions to counter the stressors of fear and powerlessness that emerged during the Trump Era and the ensuing attacks on DACA and the Immigration System. Iemphasize the structural factors that constrict young adults’ actions and the ways they negotiate fear to create strategies of protection and preservation. In Chapter Three, I examine how the compounding health, economic and political precarities present during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic shaped young adults’ passage through legalization. In the face of compounding forms of precarity, young adults drew on their prior knowledge of navigating illegality to develop an oppositional legal consciousness – as a navigation of law that allows for more liberatory and fulfillment-seeking actions. In Chapter Four, I theorize the process of becoming legal as a transition towards legality – a navigation of the shifts in changing legal statuses that involve a contention with the legal violence embedded in the laws and systems that produce (il)legalization. I examine laws’ harmful effect on young adults as they face conflicting feelings of relief and guilt and contemplate their identity and sense of belonging. They also experienced negative effects to their health; they developed chronic illnesses, anxiety and depression stemming from the coupling of prolonged illegality and regularization. In Chapter Five, I offer the implications of this work, future directions and recommendations. In a research field that rarely studies the lasting effects of legalization, particularly of young adults, my interdisciplinary work expands the scope of legal consciousness to capture the long-term consequences of law on identity, belonging, health and legal incorporation.

This dissertation contributes to the dearth of empirical research on Trans Latinxs, primarily to understand how their social location shapes their relationship to themselves, families, communities, and the state while centering their resilience. I draw on two years of participant observation, 129 surveys collected in collaboration with the TransLatin@ Coalition, and 28 in-depth interviews with Trans Latinxs in the greater Los Angeles area. I argue that gender works as an axis of power to discipline and police Trans Latinxs and Gender Non-Conforming bodies. In Chapter Two, I address how gender is shaped and policed for Trans Latinxs in terms of both their physical representation and gendered behavior. I focus particularly on the institutions of (a) home, (b) church, (c) immigration detention, and (d) employment as spaces that not only attempt to control transgressive behavior but also attempt to produce and reproduce gender norms within the binary. In Chapter Three, I argue that despite the marginalization and gender policing that Trans Latinxs experience from an early age and in everyday life, they have affirming and validating experiences that allow them to emerge into themselves and their identity as Trans Latinx individuals. I examine how Trans Latinxs in this study have found or created spaces to discover who they are and emerge as themselves through finding affirming community and the importance of a mother’s support in transitioning. In Chapter Four, I look at how spirituality is essential in the lives of Trans Latinxs. My overall argument is that Trans Latinxs do in fact embrace and practice spirituality either by (a) identifying as Christian or Catholic and/or engaging in Latino popular religion; (b) engaging in non-traditionally Latinx spaces such as other community groups, spaces, and religions to embrace their faith and spirituality; and (c) exploring and creating their own type of spirituality. In Chapter Five, I offer implications and significance of this work and future directions. This research shows how individuals have diverse and nuanced experiences within each of these sites and how they make meaning of the inclusion, exclusion, or shades of both as they transgress multiple boundaries on a daily basis.

Using a Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) framework, this study centers the experiences of four formerly incarcerated Latinas in the juvenile justice system. The project takes a holistic look at the lives of the girls and their trajectory into the prison pipeline and their transition out of the pipeline as young women making sense of themselves and their place in the world. As women of color, they are overrepresented in the prison pipeline and face greater vulnerabilities than other girls and their male of color counterparts (Nanda 2012). Using a case study approach, this paper considers how gender performance and gender (non) conformity of racialized Latinas shape their trajectory into and out of the pipeline. Findings suggest that the transgression of prescribed female gender roles is what often funneled girls into the juvenile justice system. Yet, their gender transgressions, in the form of aggressiveness and violence, were often their means of coping with physical and emotional violence upon them. The girls in this study often move between non-conformity to gender conformity as a means to navigate out of the prison system.

This master’s thesis examines the experiences and legal consciousness of undocumented young adults during the marital-based legalization process. In this work I ask: (1) How do 1.5 generation undocumented Latina/o young adults experience and navigate the marriage-based legalization process? (2) How do undocumented young adults negotiate the social and cultural expectations of marriage? (3) How do structural limitations due to legal status and gendered expectations lead men and women to experience and negotiate the marriage based legalization process? I examine these questions through twelve in-depth interviews with undocumented Latina/o young adults in Los Angeles, California. Complementing the interviews, I conduct observational fieldwork with legal and immigration clinics. In examining the experiences of undocumented young adults, historically excluded from processes granting legality, my research bridges scholarship on illegality to legality to expand knowledge about the legalizing process, the long-term effects of illegality, and the ways gendered, social and cultural expectations of marriage interact with immigration policy.

Decades before street food became trendy, People of Color overcame economic exclusion by creating their own livelihoods through street vending that brought low-cost goods and services into distressed Los Angeles communities. From 1994 to 2018, however, street vending was classified as a misdemeanor and street vendors were regularly fined, jailed, and deported. The Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign—a coalition led by Latinx and Black street vendors—organized and fought to decriminalize street vending, culminating in the signing of the Safe Sidewalk Vending Act, which effectively legalized street vending in all of California. I analyze this Campaign on three intersecting levels: (1) the spatialization and reverberations of legal violence; (2) street vending as a healing and political praxis; and (3) the cross-racial alliances and arts-based resistance that mobilizes to achieve long-term political victories.

I draw on six years of multiple ethnographic methods, including longitudinal qualitative interviews, oral histories, and participant observation. Additionally, I developed a digital humanities methodological component called “augmented fotonovelas,” which brings together an audio-visual comic format with augmented reality and text from interview transcripts to foreground how street venders transform everyday urban spaces. Through these interdisciplinary approaches, I study fifteen vendor-leaders involved in the Campaign.

Beyond neoliberal understandings of entrepreneurship, I analyze how street vendors are cultural workers who navigate sites of trauma while transforming parks and sidewalks into political and spiritual sites of healing and empowerment. I present street vendor narratives in conversation with Black and Latinx feminist geographies to broaden our understandings of street vendors’ placemaking through market exchange beyond Western capitalism and towards spaces that foster radical consciousness. This brings into view what I call “abolitionist marketplaces” that create economies of resistance where street vendors participate in inner and public acts of self and community-care as engaged political subjects. These public acts of resistance and care coalesced through visual culture productions such as graphic printmaking, murals, and music. Finally, I argue that parallel and intersecting experiences of criminalization and policing amongst Black and Latinx street vendors produced linkages and affective resonance between these respective groups; while not perfectly aligned, their mutual resistance facilitated the campaign’s successful decriminalization of street vending.