My ethnographic research draws on qualitative methods of interviews and participant-observation and contributes to the fields of Performance Studies, Chicanx/Latinx Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. I examine the cultural work of UCSB folkloric group Raíces de mi Tierra’s dance practices as a group of majority first-generation Latinx students pursuing access to upward mobility within the modern-day landscape of a Hispanic Serving Institution. Due to the simultaneous institutional valuing of “diversity” and the student-dancers’ desire to claim institutional space for their communities revealed in interviews, Raíces is both structurally and politically incentivized to represent “diversity” and produce insular performances of “authenticity” and “tradition,” rather than engage in performance work focused on cultural experimentation (Eduardo Gonzalves 2010). Throughout interviews, dancers expressed a concern with losing their cultural heritage and identity as they face the pervasive pressures to assimilate that come with pursuing a college degree, whether in the Humanities, STEM or the Social Sciences.There is a strong conscious effort amongst Raíces members to represent Latinx and more specifically, Mexican-origin communities and create accessibility to UCSB by performing “traditional” Mexican folkloric dance as the university’s only folklórico group. By enacting a “cultural preservation” paradigm, the group reproduces the “traditional” heteropatriarchal folklórico repertoire in efforts to symbolically signal the Mexican nation and thus claim space in higher education for Mexican-origin communities. Yet, the group has begun to increasingly question the limits of the traditional Mexicaness they are performing, with the emergence of queer and feminist performances of Mexicaness taking place on campus, as well as off, since at least 2013. My project maps Chicanx/Latinx student dancers’ multiple understandings of whether queer and feminist representations are possible in the cultural work of performing Mexicaness. The cultural work of Raices de mi Tierra is shaped by the tension between competing impulses, one toward “cultural preservation” in order to represent and claim space of belonging at UCSB, and another toward “cultural transformation" in order to reimagine Mexicaness to make space for the myriad of gender-sexual identities that members embody. Raíces provides an ideal site to interrogate the contradictions of the gendered-sexual cultural politics that first-generation Latinx college students navigate in performing and making “cultural home” in HSI’s.

With an interdisciplinary frame that includes methods and theories from Latina/o/x literary and cultural studies, Latina and transnational feminisms, queer theory, border studies and affect theory, this dissertation argues that Latina affect struggles with a variety of hegemonic formations that privilege patriarchal authority, heterosexuality and whiteness. It focuses on fictional narratives by contemporary writers from three different Latina communities (Chicana, Dominican and Cuban), which explore two crucial dynamics shaping Latina affect: 1) nationalistic projects in the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean that favor eurocentrism; and 2) the geopolitical relationships between Latin American countries and the United States, which consist in historical processes of colonialism, neocolonialism and immigration. Throughout my analysis, I refer to these transnational dynamics as “hegemonic affect”.

This dissertation has a twofold objective. First, to propose a cultural and literary criticism that recognizes how contemporary Latina writing practices refashion U.S. literature by establishing it as a site to negotiate both their affects as gender and racial others in the United States, as well as the affective vestiges of Latin American nationalisms that still haunt their ethnic identities. And second, to highlight the theoretical contributions of Latina feminist and writers, and Queer scholars to the affective turn.

It is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an introductory chapter, clarifying the core theoretical concepts and methods employed in the interpretations developed in the rest of the chapters. Chapter 2 points out how the project engages and contributes to current discussions in Latina/o/x Studies about racial and gender omissions within Latino ethnic nationalisms as well as about the limits of Latinidad as an umbrella term. Chapter 3 discusses the novel, Desert Blood (2005) by Chicana writer, Alicia Gaspar de Alba. My analysis explores how the social, economic and political system that prevails in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands (defined in this chapter as necrocapitalism) privileges affects that sexualize, racialize and label as disposable cheap labor the bodies of Chicanas and Mexican women, mobilizing new modes of citizenship. Chapter 4 discusses the novel, In the Name of Salomé (2000) by Dominican author, Julia Álvarez. This chapter points out how ideologies that deny blackness and establish an Indo-Hispanic identity as Dominican national identity have historically censored emotional systems associated with blackness, causing psychological damages in Afro-Dominican women. Chapter 5 discusses the novel Dreaming in Cuban (1992) by Cuban American author, Cristina García. This chapter explores the relationship between Cold War politics and Cuban American affect, which I call traumatic Cold War affect. This chapter argues that a dominant diasporic Cuban identity, based on the exile experiences of a single Cuban community, constrains the affective systems of women of Cuban origin in the U.S. My dissertation concludes outlining how the analyzed authors and narratives introduce a hemispheric and transnational perspective based on bodily focused affect that opens a new critical path for future research on Latina literature and art in relation to resistance, citizenship and national belonging in the 21st century.