As the fiftieth anniversary of testimonio approaches in 2016, Arms of America reflects on the aftermath of states of emergency and reevaluates the continuous development of the genre. Drawing on the retrospective nonlinear women's narratives about Central America--including the writings of Claribel Alegr�a, Gioconda Belli, Demetria Mart�nez, and Ana Castillo--I argue that such testimonial texts re-intervene in the war of words, historical silencing, as cultural memories and timeless consciousness-raising tools. Contesting the claim that testimonio has an expiration date predicated on immediate crisis, my readings of mixed-genre testimonies such as Alegr�a's Ashes of Izalco (1966) and Belli's The Inhabited Woman (1988) together with newly written works like Mart�nez's Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana (2005) and Castillo's Psst: I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor (2005) reveal the ways in which wartime and postwar testimonial texts alike recover hidden histories related to the body from labor in the globalized garment industry, to sexual agency within revolutionary movements, to the inner war of depression, to torture traceable to the School of the Americas. The inclusion of U.S. Latina testimonial writers is meant to engage in a transhemispheric dialogue that complicates former approaches to this decolonial literary tradition strictly bound to Latin America; applying postcolonial, queer, and feminist theories, I illumine the interweavings of unofficial truths in literature to explore their vexed relationship to history, temporality, and materiality. Arms of America challenges the commonly held assumption that testimonio is "against literature," by shedding light on women's writings simultaneously engaged in transtemporal activism and art.

This thesis explores the queer dimensions of the posthumous career of the late Tejana singer, Selena Quintanilla-P�rez, to better understand how her commercial legacy shaped disparate and unequal modes of cultural, political and economic belonging for the Latina/o LGBTQ community. Drawing from a queer, legal framework of U.S. citizenship, as well as Latina/o performance and media scholarship, I contend that the production and consumption of “Selena commodities” provides a window into both shifting and stagnant representations of queer Latina/o identity within both U.S. popular culture and Latin American entertainment. For a population of new sexual subject-citizens, Selena’s commercial legacy is used as a transcultural strategy to expand gender formations, express sexual fluidity and demand inclusion to public space. This thesis quantifies this alternative expression of belonging as queer Latinx cultural citizenship; a radical, embodied strategy of disidentification that emphasizes the connections between cultural and commercial visibility with the affirmation of cultural, racial, gendered and sexual difference from normative ideals and political enfranchisement. Yet this strategy towards representation does not always function equally across genders. By centering the legal, commercial and artistic dimensions of Selena’s queer legacy, this thesis demonstrates how Selena commodities offer an incomplete platform from which to articulate queer Latinx cultural citizenship.

Performances of Mestizaje in 20th/21st Century Literature of the Americas examines the relationship between representation, performance, and colonial discourse by 1) tracing crucial flashpoints in the evolution of a literary, performative, critical mestizaje and 2) by tracking iterative, textual performances of what I call colonial scripts—iterations of social behaviors or systems of power that reproduce and normalize colonial violence and the logic of racial difference. The project moves through two key moments in history: the crisis of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the crisis of neo-liberialism of the late 20th century. Through a case study model, I use Latinx and Indigenous literature of the Americas—María Cristina Mena's short stories (1913-1931), Sandra Cisneros' Caramelo (2002), Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Mayra Montero's The Last Night I Spent with You (1991/2000)—that offer various regional representations of mestizaje. My dissertation uses literature to provide a comparative study of the ways in which mestizaje functions as both a discourse of dominance and resistance in a Mexican, Chicana, Indigenous, and Caribbean context. In considering these different contexts and their similar colonial histories, I argue that mestizaje can function as a space of creativity and cultural critique rather than as solely a tool of assimilation.

“Desert Dreams” probes the discursive intersections of trauma, identity, and the body across experimental works of contemporary literature and performance (1998-2023) by artists of the Latin American diaspora. I bring attention to the monolithic archetype and border fantasies central to the figure of post-Enlightenment “Man” as structuring hierarchies of race through a politics of identity. I argue that Man in this sense is a “homunculus” that orders the world’s political economy and enables the US to maintain hegemony over desire. TransBorder writers reveal the inherent fragmentation of identity and lack of control undergirding said figure by unearthing alternative understandings of the body. In the realm of TransBorder performance, these artists also launch interventions into the actual transnational political economy, while imagining possible futures beyond the coloniality of borders. Central to my dissertation is a theory of “queer transitivity” which is attuned to the textual and bodily ruptures and reconstructions of minoritarian aesthetics. Queer transitivity marks the productive slippages between trauma and the erotic through notions of structural indeterminacy and contingency. These slippages mark the possibility of moving beyond an economy of desire that is dominated by coloniality, which itself requires the policing of our bodies and sedimentation of our identities. Ultimately, TransBorder artists tap into repressed queer affects and the trans* process of identity formation to make room for not only subjective transformation, but also speculation on our collective futures. In the face of the racialized and gendered fantasies of borders and representation, their alternative scripts, visions, and erotic practices constitute new ethical imaginations to capitalism, or, “desert dreams.”