RESEARCH

I work across the fields of queer, affect, and critical race theories and US Latinx, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies. My book project, Colorblind Aesthetics in Latinx Literature and Law, reimagines Latinx literature by centering race implicit––as opposed to explicit––aesthetics. Emerging during the Cultural Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Latinx literature coalesced around a racialized, straight identity. Since the 1990s, however, it has contended with deracialized language and mainstream LGBT representation. Tracking these changes in 20th and 21st century US law and Latinx literatures, I show that when the law removes race from language, it hides racism. When Latinx novels and short-stories remove race, they teach us to look for it elsewhere: in the language of queerness and the structures of literary form. This project illustrates that race relations today are mediated through gender and sexuality; queerness is the language that silenced race speaks.

A recent article on this topic, “Colorblind Aesthetics in Manuel Muñoz: Reading Race in Form and Feeling,” appears in MELUS Journal. A chapter that historicizes this returned focus on form and aesthetics (and how it’s indebted to queer performance studies) is forthcoming as “The Formal Turn in Latinx Literature and Criticism” in Cambridge University Press’ Latinx Literature and Critical Futurities, 1992-2020. 

I am also co-editing with Melanie Abeygunawardana Colorblind: Liberal Racism from Past to Present, an interdisciplinary anthology that organizes scholarship around pre- and post-Civil Rights iterations of colorblindness; its injurious effects on subjects both within and beyond the Black-white binary, namely Asian American, Indigenous, and Latinx subjects; and its manifestations beyond the bounds of the US. This research has been supported by Sunlit: The Sue-Je Lee Gage Residency for Human Rights and Social Justice. 

Other publications include: 

Book Reviews

Review of Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces by Tonino Griffero. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, pp.50-56, 2020. 

Review of Decolonizing Primary English Language Teaching by Mario E. López-Gopar. Journal of Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, pp.217-218, 2017.

Review of …y no se lo tragó la tierra/And the Earth Did Not Devour Him by Tomás Rivera and Evangelina Vigil-Piñon. Journal of South Texas Historical Association, 2017.

Scholarly Dictionary Entries

Entries in The Chicana and Chicano Movement: From Aztlán to Zapatistas, edited by Adelaida del Castillo and Norma Iglesias. Forthcoming.

• “Sleepy Lagoon Case”
• “U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 1969 Decision on Mexican Americans”

Public Humanities

• “Queer Lessons on Latinx Methods,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America. September 18, 2023.