Keeping Us Together: Care and Resistance in LGBTQ+ Latine Community Work

• In Event: Rethinking the Status Quo: Toward a More Equitable Future of Latina/o Sociology

Abstract

On September 8, 2025, the United States Supreme Court overturned a prior district court order that had prohibited Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from stopping and arresting individuals based on race or Latine ethnicity, accent, location, or occupation (Immigrant Legal Resource Center 2025). In a context where government officials are legally permitted to target civilians based on perceived illegality and ethnicity, building strong Latine community infrastructures becomes urgent. Community survival cannot depend on conformity to dominant racial and heterosexual norms. Instead, it requires spaces where difference can exist without punishment or policing. Under these conditions, queerness becomes analytically central—not primarily as an identity, but as a nonnormative orientation toward belonging.This study asks: how do queer Latine community workers build community across difference, laying the groundwork for survival and resistance under intensified immigration enforcement? I argue that they do so through connective labor (Pugh 2023), the everyday work of building, sustaining, and repairing relationships in ways that enable group cohesion. Drawing on ten months of qualitative research at a Latine community center in East Los Angeles (pseudonym: Centro Esperanza), including participant observation and in-depth interviews with staff, I examine how community workers transform affective labor into infrastructures of inclusion and protection. Bringing together scholarship on surveillance, community-based organizations, affective labor, and LGBTQ+ Latine belonging, this research reframes resistance as sustained relational labor. Rather than treating community as preexisting, I show how it is actively forged through care, trust, and reciprocity under conditions of fear and state-sanctioned violence.

Author

• Isabella Carolina Rivera Volquez, University of California-Los Angeles