This dissertation examines how nineteenth-century American and Latinx Studies have choreographed a geography of Latinx “arrival” and “discovery” following the drawing of the U.S.-Mexican border in 1848. Moving away from national territories that are landlocked by that timeline, my project disrupts Latinx subject formations by dancing to a score of queer performances of latinidad drawn across passages of water. I argue that attuning ourselves to alternative aqueous channels that rift the American landscape can teach us how to radically re-read culturally dominant American literary texts that have informed our limited territorialized understanding of latinidad. Moreover, my turn to various bodies of water rather than land helps us consider multiple strategies for disrupting the territorial boundaries of the nineteenth-century American map and allows us Latinxs to unpin ourselves from spatiotemporal coordinates that are inherently tied to the legacies of colonialism and U.S. nation building.

While each of the chapters in the dissertation read queer latinidad in materials that are often canonized and taught in American literary survey courses, the chapters do not attempt to recover or redeem the American canon in any kind of way. Rather, I read the undercurrents that move beneath the territorial geographies constructed by these texts to saturate the nineteenth-century American map with dissonant queer Latinx performances swimming on the margins of the page. This reading practice calls for a deep interrogation of latinidades that cannot be contained, situated, or easily represented within the U.S. and its canonical body of literature. Ultimately, my aim in this writing is a pedagogical and instructive endeavor that invites readers of the margin, whether they identify as Latinx or not, to draw out their corporeal relationship with books and boundaries that intentionally sought to erase us.