UCLA

Transgender Latina immigrants occupy a limited and unfavorable space in the popular imagination. Essentialist and reductive master narratives erase the richness and complexity of this community. General representations of trans Latinas fixate on gender and racial violence, and victimization. Rarely do these representations focus on experiences that embody trans Latinas’ everyday lives, struggles, love, aspirations and acts of resilience.

The need for alternative discourses for trans Latina immigrants is especially pressing now under the Trump administration when immigrants are depicted as economic and cultural threats to the “Great American” way of life, and immigrant families are torn apart as parents get deported en masse and their children abandoned to an uncertain future. There are very few published works written by transgender Latina immigrants. Accounts of transgender women’s experiences in the media, and in the fields of medicine and psychiatry vastly overwhelm those of actual transgender women. My research addresses this gap in the literature by centering and facilitating recovered histories and experiences of Trans Latina immigrants through a methodology I call critical autoethnography. Using participatory action research, I will recruit, engage, and guide the participation of transgender Latina immigrants to help design a way of writing about the self that is both a personal narrative about their life experiences, as well as a critical self- reflection—hence the name, “critical autoethnography.” This collaborative writing method generates transgender Latina immigrant narratives as told by the participants, themselves, in their own voices, and focuses on issues, struggles, and experiences that they choose to make the subject of their narrative. Not only do these critical autoethnographies challenge anti-immigrant and white heteropatriarchal rhetoric, they also contribute to a trans Latina immigrant archive and epistemology. This methodology offers a new way for trans Latinas to write themselves into history, as Chicana historian Emma Perez advocates, and thus decolonize their representation.