Though US immigration policy has long relied on managing migrants and their access to legal documents, the current immigration crisis presents a distinct legal landscape buttressed on the unreliability of national archives that have helped the state constitute a working definition of legality and citizenship. In this talk, Dr. de la Garza Valenzuela will argue that, like fictional representations of Latinos/as/xs, the law has historically produced its own narratives--fictions even--of queers and migrants that cultural and literary critics are uniquely poised to urgently read, interpret, and challenge in light of the present legal and cultural assaults against Latino/a/x immigrants. Analyzing representations of queer migration in Rigoberto Gonzalez's novel Crossing Vines and Jaime Cortez's Sexile/Sexilio, a graphic biography of transgender activist and performer Adela Vasquez, this presentation will illustrate the competing narratives of migration and citizenship that emerge from the relationships migrants have to identification documents that counter the exclusionary definitions of authorized national belonging consolidated and supported by the fictions about queer and migrant communities conatined in the US's legal archive.
