Racialized Transmisogyny, Necropolitics, and New Methodologies for Survival

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Narratives of silence, death, absence, and destruction dominate the telling of transgender Latina lives. This is reflected in the media coverage and academic work on Gwen Araujo and Angie Zapata, two young trans Latinas murdered in the U.S., and Roxana Hernandez, a trans Honduran asylum-seeker killed by U.S. Customs & Border Protection. Scholars in Transgender Studies, particularly those focusing on necropolitics, have shown how the intersection of transmisogyny, racism, and xenophobia leads to the harm or death of trans people. After we bury our dead, how do we push ourselves to also think through the intricate power relationships without being ensnared by the political, material, and social confines of death? What new methodologies arise for studying trans latina life? What emergent political projects become necessary to preserve and prolong a trans latina existence?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Sexual Violence and the Trans Latina Condition - Esperanza O Santos, Rutgers University-Newark

• Survival by any Means Necessary: TGNC labor during the War on Drugs - Daniela I Valdes, Princeton University

• Archives of Aliveness: Black Trans* Latinas & the Politics of Self-Preservation - Alan C Pelaez Lopez, University of California-Davis

Chair

• Francisco J Galarte, University of New Mexico

Comment

• Francisco J Galarte, University of New Mexico

Biographical Information

Esperanza Onoria Santos (she/her) (eox.santos@rutgers.edu) is a graduate student in the American Studies PhD program at Rutgers University- Newark. Esperanza was born in San Diego, California (Kumeyaay Land) to parents born in Zacatecas, Mexico. She is currently developing a dissertation that argues against trans Latinas as objects of tragedy in order to argue that our lives, livelihoods, and agency are also worthy sites of investigation. At RU-N, she has worked at with the Queer Newark Oral History Project, the James Street Oral History Project, and the Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar Series and the Lordes Casal Project. Additionally, she lead the Arts Committee for the 2023 strike lead by the AAUP-AFT Union. She is interested in being a scholar of Latinx Literature and Culture, Queer Transnationalisms, Queer/Trans History, Trans of Color Critique, and Transfeminismo.

Daniela Valdes is a historian of twentieth-century U.S. history and the modern carceral state, as well as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University (starting Fall 2025). Her research focuses on the history of gender, sexual, and neurological diversity. Her scholarship has been awarded prizes by the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Scholars and the African American Intellectual History Society.

Alan Pelaez Lopez (apelaezlopez@ucdavis.edu) is an Assistant Professor of literature and visual culture in the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies at UC Davis. They specialize in African and African diasporic migration, performance contracts (legal, philosophical, and theatrical), state violence, and trans* studies. Dr. Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the International Latino Book Award, to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020), and the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona, 2023).