A book-length braided essay-like collection of poetry and nonfiction pieces addressing the author’s coming out experience as a gay man living in Mexico and then crossing into the United States. It offers a review of the moments in the life of the lyrical voice growing up as a gay middle class Mexican man who at an early age was required to learn English as a second language. It is a story about family and community relationships examined under the scope of sexuality, class, and nationality. The narrative is enabling a comparison between the authors romantic life while living in Mexico as opposed to the experience of sexuality in the United States. Furthermore, it is a mapping of a community from the year of coming of age and what it meant to come out during the decade of the nineties in a third world country such as Mexico. The braided essay structure responds to he need to intermingle these experiences of the world; it is an attempt to describe how different parts of the concept of identity come are suddenly bound through these stories and poems under the same book-length collection. As the author’s awareness shifts focus by crossing the border between the United States and Mexico, in the post-NAFTA, post-911 era. The text offers a reflection on how the power dynamics of culture, globalization, and social justice intersect and affect queer bodies of color in a transnational landscape.

Early gender and sexuality scholars established that the Isthmus Zapotec societies organize around womanhood and tolerate gender and sexual variance. However, their literary tradition has been dominated by male authors, and Zapotec women and sexual variant authors were only able to find the right conditions to see their literary works published only after the turn of the twenty-first century. Historically, there have been many reports of domestic violence and trans/homophobia accounts that the well-known description of the matriarchal nature of the Zapotec people has come into question. The dissertation delineates the expansion of both the Western and the Zapotec literary traditions by analyzing contemporary Zapotec works that challenge colonial notions of gender and sexuality by sharing the perspectives and lived experiences of Zapotecs living in the present. These texts foreground how these Indigenous writers negotiate and navigate the borders of gender and sexuality between Zapotec cosmovision and the modern views of the hegemonic Mexican society. A theoretical consideration of these literary works using the perspective of Coloniality of power can help reframe the relationship between colonialism and gender and sexuality. In addition, a reading o f these works based on kab’awilian (double gaze) strategies will be useful to describe how these authors negotiate their existence between the mainstream Mestizo culture and their Zapotec cosmolectics; as well as to exist between the normalized patriarchal violence of Mexican and Zapotec cultures and the solidarity safe spaces they can find in the communities they choose to love. One of the main arguments is that these literary works offer a deeper first-person insight to the nuances of the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in an Indigenous nation from Oaxaca, México, than any other of the works produced about their people and their culture by multiple artists, scientists, and writers. The dissertation examines the works of writers from two different generations. I named the first generation “Guie’ Xhuuba’” (isthmus jasmine) and includes Natalia Toledo Paz, Irma Pineda Santiago, Víctor Cata, Gerardo Valdivieso Parada, and Lukas Avendaño. The next generation of zapotec writers is called “Siadó’ Guie’ Ru’” (morning flower, sunrise) and includes the works of Yadira del Mar, Elvis Guerra, and Paula Ya López.