"We are Turtles”: Latinidades Creating Home in the Face of Violence

• In Event: Muxeristas, Feministas and the New Regime: Building Critical Solidarity in Chicana Feminism

Abstract

Home is a dynamic socially made space where different adjectives may be ascribed to the places called home: safety, violence, danger, peace, threat, calm, and other affective, social, political meanings. Communities create home as diasporas on new lands, maintain ties to a home through transnational networks, are made to feel like they do not belong in hostile environments when denied the right to adequate housing or forcibly removed through militaristic responses to people on the move. This project spans 8 years including interviews, focus groups, surveys, observations, and content analysis to make sense of the dynamic meaning making of home in the face of violence where the author listened and witnessed communities of Latinidad and LGBTQ in multiple cities who experienced sexual violence, domestic violence, or human trafficking. This project focuses on two specific sites: San Francisco and Salt Lake City. As the affective power of the state shapes how communities feel at home (or denied a sense of home), this paper examines the resistant strategies of communities in face of anti-immigration, anti-Latinidad, and anti-TLBGBQ discourse. Recognizing the adaptive and resistant strategies of communities, scholars of Latinidad turned to include Gloria Anzaldúa who inspired communities to recognize the adaptive strategies of finding home in their own bodies: “I am a turtle. Wherever I go, I carry my home on my back.” This presentation discusses case exemplars, provides a brief policy context, and pulls in the voices of Latinidades to discuss how violence impacts home creation (in bodies, and in a place), and the diasporic possibilities of nepantleras who create resistant strategies in the face of xenophobic and racist discourse and practice.

Author

• Annie I Fukushima, University of Utah