In May 2014 Time magazine declared that we had arrived at the “transgender tipping point,” as visibility of the transgender community increased. Yet, this was hardly the tipping point as violence against transgender men and women had been part of the daily-lived experiences. Indeed, a month earlier the body of Zoraida Reyes, an undocumented transgender women and community activist from Orange County, California was murdered. Reyes’ death was certainly not the first of its kind but one that was followed by an unprecedented number of murdered transgender women in the year of 2015. This paper explores the pedagogical importance of queer and trans communities of color telling their own stories to create a counter narrative to the co-optation of trans narratives via a neoliberal framework of inclusivity that disregards the material condition that transgender woman of color face.

Through an analysis of the short-film Afuera (2016) directed by Steven Liang explores the lives of Jennifer an undocumented transgender women living in Los Angeles. The film portrays the constraint choices that undocumented transgender women face as they attempt to live their authentic self. This paper also examines what took place after a civil disobedience on May 28, 2015 in Santa Ana, California. The civil disobedience called for the release of all undocumented transgender detainees. Santa Ana, Ca. was targeted because the city at the time had a designated space for LGBTQ undocumented migrants. These counter narratives offer sites of epistemology grounded in their everyday experiences that offer both collective and individual stories that speak against power demonstrating moments of joy.

My Master’s thesis project explores the ways Chicanas negotiate an indigenous-based spiritual practice centering the experiential knowledges of women who participate in full moon healing circles. Specifically, this research focuses on Omecihuatl, from Orange County, California, and Coyolxauhqui Full Moon Circle from Los Angeles, California, to demonstrate how Chicanas understand their individual and collective healing. By conducting oral histories of six participants, I trace their healing journey as well as how they came to participate in the full moon circles. In this research, the questions I raise are: how do Chicanas’ spiritual and healing practices inform their journeys toward healing? What are the experiences of some Chicanas participating in healing circles? What are the relationships between these women with Indigenous and Native American peoples, practices, and knowledges within healing circles?

While some of the women I interviewed have a connection to indigenous ancestral knowledge, most women experience detribalization. Inspired by Gloria Anzald�a’s concept of Coyolxauqui Imperative, and Maria Josefina Salda�a Portillo and Maria Eugenia Cotera’s concept Mestizo Mourning, I use Coyolxauhqui mourning to articulate a detribalized Chicana experience. This works in two ways. The first, in attempting to put an indigenous-based spiritual practice, detribalized Chicanas are missing practices and links to indigenous ancestry. Like the pieces of Coyolxauhqui that are lost in her dis-memberment and cannot be recovered, Chicanas face the same dilemma—they can re-member pieces, but something will be lost in their re-connection. In the case of detribalized Chicanas, they must mourn those lost pieces. For some Chicanas, this means grieving the loss of a direct tie to an indigenous ancestry. Second, Coyolxauhqui mourning means a re-connection to an indigenous identity and practice through honoring native and indigenous ceremonies, disrupting indigenist iconography, and honoring elders’ and ancestors’ epistemologies to attain healing and wholeness. I argue that Coyolxauhqui mourning works to understand a possible path to re-connect an indigenous-based spirituality and healing of detribalized Chicanas.

Healing Justice in Chicana/x feminist organizing focuses on an unexplored healing justice tradition, specifically Chicana/x feminist interventions meant to engender whole and healthy communities. In this research, I bring into focus a long lineage of healing justice in Chicana/x movements that–while providing a rich foundation for the contemporary work happening in Chicana/o/x communities—have not been fully explored before now. I assert that Chicana/x healing justice, which I elaborate in this dissertation, includes intersectional wholeness, community care, and healing from historical trauma. I argue that healing justice is not a new phenomenon in Chicana/x feminist organizing. Instead, there is a wealth of examples from different Chicana/x feminist movements that show how Chicana/xs have merged community wellness, healing, and social justice in unique ways according to specific needs. Recognizing this legacy will help ensure that Chicana/o/x activism considers the needs of communities and the importance of addressing intersectional experiences going forward. This dissertation offers a glimpse of the collaborative research I participated in the last seven years with Mujeres de Ma�z and Full Moon Healing Circles, as well as intergenerational conversations with Chicana/x feminists. This research sets out to answer the following questions: What is healing justice in a Chicana/x context? What is the genealogy of healing justice in Chicana/x feminist organizing? How are contemporary Chicana/x activists and artivists practicing healing justice? I draw on ten oral histories and seven years of participant observation to better understand how Chicana/x feminist activists inform a Chicana/x healing justice framework. This dissertation is organized into three parts. The first begins by honoring the early work of Chicana feminist activists Gloria Arellanes and Celia Herrera Rodriguez. Specifically, I center the oral histories of Chicana maestras whose community activism spans about 40 years. Then, I discuss the women of color artivist collective Mujeres de Ma�z to demonstrate how organizing practices and holistic art practices can inform a Chicana/x healing justice politic. I end with a case study on full moon healing circles Omecihuatl from Orange County, CA and Coyolxauhqui Full Moon Circle from East Los Angeles, CA to highlight how self-care is a part of community care.

Constellations of the Abject: Brown, Queer, and Feminist Punks in Los Angeles significantly contributes to queer, feminist, Latinx cultures by examining expressive cultures and placemaking in Southeast Los Angeles by queer and feminist Chicanx/Latinx punks. My work moves beyond expected places Latinx cultural production to show how spatial, affective, and sonic practices shape the process of placemaking for communities that often feel out of “place.” Drawing on the theories of space (Handhart 2013), sound (Vargas 2014, Vazquez 2013), and abjection (Alvarado 2018), this dissertation explores how punks use the shared affect of abjection to create community as an alternative form of placemaking in Southeast Los Angeles. Centering Southeast Los Angeles (SELA), CA as the nexus, a community that is defined by the scarcity of jobs, lack of opportunities, bad air, and perceived lack of beauty. Yet, embracing the very qualities that aremade abject and pathologized by gendered, racialized, classed politics of respectability is precisely what brings together queer and feminist punks in SELA to produce new forms of belonging affective communities.

Taking up the task of tracing brown queer and feminist punk genealogies of SELA, through the use of oral histories, ethnography, participant observation, archival research, and visual analysis of performance to answer the following: how does the affect of abjection and unintelligibility form communities? How do archival practices work to preserve the disaffected and excess of marginalized punk communities of SELA? What insights might we gain about queer and feminist punk communities by paying attention to space and sound? Lastly, how do intergenerational collaborations produce knew knowledges of gender, sexuality, and brownness for punks from Southeast Los Angeles? My focus on Latinx punk placemaking centers how queers and feminists Chicanx/Latinx punks collectively create communities through sound by precisely embracing the undesirable qualities of living in neglected neighborhoods. Through community formation queer and feminist Latinx/Chicanx punks contest gentrification, form community.

This thesis takes up “care work platforms” as an object of study. I define ‘care work platforms’ as digital infrastructures that enable care work service providers and individuals seeking care work services to interact. This paper argues for thinking about care work platforms as technoscientific objects that fit the criteria of global assemblages and proceeds to analyze four Los Angeles-based platforms: Tidy, Handy, Care.com and Alia using new media analyses. Furthermore, I consider the implications of care work platforms on what scholars in Latina/o Studies have called technofuturos, or the study of Latinidades during a period of accelerated globalization, in particular the globalization of care work and information.

This dissertation is a Chicana feminist analysis of the work and visual tactics of contemporary Chicana/o digital artivists—artist/activist, according to the work of Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre—in California from 2000 until circa 2016. Given the growing body of artivist work being produced today and its distribution via digital means, my research theorizes the Chicana Radical Digital Aesthetic (CRDA) as a praxis and theoretical lens to analyze how new digital artivists are changing contemporary social justice efforts. I focus on six artivists: Elizabeth Blancas, Jesus Barraza, Melanie Cervantes, Jessica Sabogal, Julio Salgado, and Favianna Rodriguez. I center their work and knowledge as key actors in a current Chicanx twenty-first-century digital arts movement exploring the digital realm as a space of production, distribution, and reception of a new generation of Chicanx artivism spanning national and transnational social justice movements. I continue the growing scholarship on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-made graphic arts that connects the rich tradition of graphic art from the 1960s–1970s civil rights era to contemporary digital art practice. Drawing on my experiences as both an artivist and an active participant in contemporary Chicanx art communities, my methodology combines oral history interviews, visual analysis, and collaborative artmaking. I theorize the Chicana Radical Digital Aesthetic (CRDA) in order to trace the political poster from the printed material object to digital graphic artivist tool. In Chapter Two, I focus on the practice of self-portraits, and portraiture more broadly, through analysis of Julio Salgado and Jessica Sabogal’s work. Chapter Three links the internationalist roots of Chicanx art between 1965 and 1995, as well as the contributions of Chicana feminist printmakers from the post-Vietnam period to contemporary internationalist themes in digital work. Chapter Four examines how Melanie Cervantes and Favianna Rodriguez employ a strategy of embodiment on multiple scales—their own physical bodies as well as their larger environment and the “digital” spaces they inhabit. Chapter Five details what I term “Networks of Care” among Chicanx/Latinx artivists online and the myriad resources they share in a digital community. I conclude by discussing the ways Latinx/Chicanx artivists have engaged with the growing concerns of a racially biased algorithm and new directions that result from this work.

This project emerges from the circulation of discourse between the Obama Administration, the media, and (im)migrant rights organizers about how to see and what to call migrants who live in the US without legal status (“illegal,” “undocumented,” “undocuqueer,” “DACAmented,” “DREAMer,” “DAPAmented”). Considering the evolution of this terminological struggle alongside the proliferation of scholarship on undocumented populations, the call for eligible undocumented migrants to prepare their official documents for deferred action programs, and enactments of “documenting the undocumented” in three recent works of performance art, this thesis questions how legal labels and categories work within larger ideological regimes that determine whether Latina/o migrants in the US are granted eligibility for “legal presence,” are marked as targets for removal, or are held in a state of legal uncertainty. I propose a theory of “systems of documentation,” a critical framework for analyzing the regulatory technologies specific to the subjection of (im)migrant bodies and envisioning strategies of refusal and transformation.

This master thesis project explores the ways in which the deserving/undeserving immigrant binary politically targets subject for incorporation into a national neoliberal project, while excluding others. Simultaneously, I also investigate the ways in which these targeted subjects have organized in response to structural inequities and in the process, have been making their own sense of political subjectivity. In this research I ask, what are the myths of good immigrant that have been created around undocumented immigrant students that produces a kind of exceptionalism that justifies incorporation? In what ways are undocumented student organizers consenting and contesting these narratives?

I examine the process of subjectification, “being made” through social norms and laws and “self-making” through everyday modes of resistance, of undocumented immigrant student organizers. I argue that undocumented immigrant student organizers have deployed a differential consciousness that has allowed them to identify ideological differences and oppositional expressions of power as opportunities for coalitions of resistance to challenge inequities within higher education and the dehumanization of immigrant morality binaries.

In looking at the contribution of Indigenous punk and hard rock bands, there has been a long history of punk that started in Northern Arizona, as well as a current diverse scene in the Southwest ranging from punk, ska, metal, doom, sludge, blues, and black metal. Din�, Apache, Hopi, Pueblo, Gila, Yaqui, and O’odham bands are currently creating vast punk and metal music scenes. In this thesis, I argue that Native punk is not just a cultural movement, but a form of survivance. Bands utilize punk and their stories as a conduit to counteract issues of victimhood as well as challenge imposed mechanisms of settler colonialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, notions of being fixed in the past, as well as bringing awareness to genocide and missing and murdered Indigenous women. Through D.I.Y. and space making, bands are writing music which resonates with them, and are utilizing their own venues, promotions, zines, unique fashion, and lyrics to tell their stories. The new wave of punk music and artists are making space for bands that are led by femme, transgender, and non-binary musicians. Moreover, Indigenous women are making spaces in historically white, male dominated scenes. I will be using the framework by Anishinaabe scholar, Gerald Vizenor of survivance which is “an active resistance and repudiation of dominance, as well as obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry.” In this case, I will be looking at punk as a form of survivance in four themes of environmental and Indigenous rights, D.I.Y. space making, gender/queer empowerment, and positive mental health and strength for the future generations. By using punk rock, this thesis will share stories of how bands have denounced being victims or static in the past. I will be using textural analysis, discursive themes, non-institutional archives, looking at oral histories, performances, zines, flyers, video footage, lyrics, digital archival evidence, documentaries, band social medias, newspapers, as well as using interviews to substantiate my arguments. Indigenous punk bands are continuing their long legacy and movement of punk rock in the Four Corners region.

In this dissertation, I engage works of performance, video, and sculpture by five U.S.-based migrant artists from Central America and Mexico: Yosimar Reyes (Mexico), Julio Salgado (Mexico), Alan Pelaez Lopez (Oaxaca), Alma Leiva (Honduras), and Beatriz Cortez (El Salvador). Drawing on five years of qualitative fieldwork including interviews with the artists, participation in migrant justice actions and organizing spaces, and community-engaged performance collaborations, I employ discourse analysis and deep visual, sonic, and textual analysis to interpret these creative works against a backdrop of U.S. immigration politics and queer interventions into the migrant justice movement. Ample scholarship since the dawn of the War on Terror has centered on two sites of explicit state violence against racialized migrants: detention and deportation. I organize my analysis around a third and interrelated axis of state power: documentation. Building from scholarship in Latinx migration studies, queer of color performance and dance, governmentality, and Indigenous studies, I formulate here a theory of surveillance I term the documentation regime. I define the documentation regime as a system of administrative governance that surveils racialized migrants in past, present, and future temporalities, in order to restrict, predict, and produce migrant movements within and across U.S. territory. In addition to operationalizing state surveillance, the documentation regime also activates the watchful gazes of non-state entities: journalists, academics, non-profits, lawyers, artists, media producers, and citizens. I employ my documentation regime framework to analyze the distinct ways that racialized migrants are targeted for state- and non-state surveillance in the settler colonial United States — and the ways migrant artists perform queer subversions of the documentation regime. I chart four major technologies of the documentation regime, and each chapter examines one of the four: state-sponsored data collection through temporary immigration documents; state-issued IDs containing biometric data; transnational data sharing agreements; and state-sanctioned destruction of official databases. I identify three settler colonial logics that underwrite the documentation regime: visibility, choreography, and temporality. I argue that the artists in my study subvert the surveillance of the documentation regime in performances of queer mis/recognition, relationality, and futurity.