RESEARCH
AREAS OF FOCUS
My work brings trans studies and Chicanx/Latinx studies into conversation through the everyday aesthetics of self-fashioning — from the borderlands to the runway.
Photo by: @darklistedphotography
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A
TRANS STUDIES
Trans of color critique,
embodiment,
figuration, and loss.
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B
CHICANX / LATINX
Borderlands, masculinities, femininities,
and brownness.
CURRENT PROJECTS
/ Smile Now, Cry Later: An Affective Grammar of Chicano Masculinity — monograph in preparation
Smile Now, Cry Later: An Affective Grammar of Chicano Masculinity makes an argument I have spent years learning how to hear. Chicano masculinity is not a cultural deficit or a repertoire of traits to be catalogued and corrected. It is a grammar, a system of rules for combining feeling into meaning, spoken fluently by men who did not know they were speaking it. I read four affects: ardor, the burn that is also political zeal; orgullo, the dignity that is also endurance; gusto, the appetite that is also a theory of style; and amor, the love that holds what the other three have been through. I follow them across an archive of fashion, dance, political performance, and photography. I read from a trans-analytic, the reading practice of a trans Chicano who was never simply handed this grammar and can therefore taste what the field has processed as power but rarely heard as feeling.
/ Brokered Care: AIDS, Church, and State in New Mexico — book in progress
Brokered Care turns to New Mexico in the late 1980s to ask how the AIDS crisis was governed in a place largely absent from the coastal archives that dominate the historiography of the epidemic. Reading through Common Bond Ink, the state's gay and lesbian community newspaper (1986–1989), I follow the negotiations its pages made visible: legislative maneuvering in Santa Fe, Catholic task forces mediating between the archdiocese and the sick, and a municipal "Hazard File" whose contents I am pursuing through public records requests. The book argues that in New Mexico the epidemic was governed not by confrontation but by brokerage, an arrangement of church, state, and community whose terms determined who received care and who was surveilled.
/ Dolores: A Cultural History of Pain in Latinx America — book project in development
Dolores asks how pain has been racialized, gendered, medicalized, and lived across the American nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing disability studies' critique of cure into conversation with Latinx studies, the book traces the uneven credibility of pain, asking whose suffering is believed, whose is spectacularized, and whose is erased, through five archival case studies: Mrs. Nash, a Mexican-born laundress, midwife, and healer with Custer's Seventh Cavalry; the letters and journals of novelist Arturo Islas; the archive of essayist Richard Rodriguez; the fashion illustration archive of Antonio Lopez; and Eduardo Hernández Santos's photographic artist's book El Muro (2009), documenting the queer community along Havana's Malecón. Across these figures, gender crossing emerges as the through-line: a history of bodies that the archive punished, exoticized, or refused to hear, and of the healing, artistry, and pleasure they made anyway.