Cultural & International

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Documenting the Undocumentable: Queer Migrant Labor and Contested Archival Legalities in Rigoberto González’s Crossing Vines and Jaime Cortez’s Sexile/Sexilio

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
Department of Latina/Latino Studies
Location
1207 W. Oregon, Urbana, room 103
Date
Nov 18, 2019   4:00 pm  
Speaker
Dr. José A. de la Garza Valenzuela, English Department, Florida Atlantic University
Views
69
Originating Calendar
Latina/Latino Studies Event Calendar

Though U.S. 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 migrants. Analyzing representations of queer migration in Rigoberto González’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 contained in the U.S.’s legal archive. At a time where migration is managed through the precarious scribbling of identification numbers of children’s forearms, asylum-seeker waiting lists tracked by migrants outside of the U.S. legal borders, and images of and data from detention centers are limited and monitored, Dr. de la Garza Valenzuela will argue for a reconsideration of LGBTQ+ and immigration reform advocacy that accounts for the contemporary precarity of the archive and the and the peril queer migrants face when our advocacy affirms the authority of the legal archive’s fictions.

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