My dissertation, “Amor Eterno e Inolvidable: Queer Diasporic Practices of LatinxIdentification and Mourning” analyzes three case studies of queer diasporic subjectivity and the ways that gay Latinx men are grieved and memorialized in social media sites: 1) Mexican singer Juan Gabriel who never publicly articulated his homosexuality; 2) celebrity makeup artist Jacob Yebale who lived his out queer life as he lived in the United States and worked transnationally; and 3) the victims of the Pulse Orlando nightclub, a mass shooting incident at a gay night club during their themed “Latin Night.” Connecting the fields of Latinx studies, sexuality studies, religious studies, and migration and transnational community studies, this dissertation examines how sexuality and gender are performed and transformed in diasporic and transnational contexts for queer (non-normative and Gay, Bisexual, MSM) identified men, with special attention to how the public(ized) lives of queer men impart needed information and lessons on “how to be gay” (Halperin 2014) for diasporic Latinx boys and men. I argue that the primary subjects of each chapter (Juan Gabriel, Jacob Yebale, and victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting) negotiated their own disidentifications in public media. The primary intellectual and personal goal of this dissertation is to show how queer Latinx persons utilized social media to expand the counterstories left in the wake of death--to represent and archive queer diasporic identities in public forums.

This project adopts an interdisciplinary lens grounded in the transnational analytics of Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, and Asian Studies to better understand the formation of North Korea as a political and cultural construct within a U.S.-based context. This project analyzes a collection of texts such as: congressional hearings, documentaries, archival materials, non-fiction material, and comedy to draw out the larger common sense portrays North Korea as an unstable, rogue nation. I argue that this common sense establishes North Korea as being “interiorly different” which adds ideological difference as another measure of racial difference. The goal of this dissertation is to outline the ways in which the interiorized difference of North Korea has

been used fulfill the imperatives of different political projects such as: American militarism, global humanitarianism, and the American Left. As such, this project explicates how North Korea has become a malleable construction that has been shaped in different ways within American political and cultural discourse.

This dissertation discusses the Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement Program in Argentina, 1979-1982. It explores the process by which Posadas became the nucleus of Lao life in Argentina, highlighting important junctures in the transition from a resettlement policy mediated by the UNHCR and the Argentine Interior Ministry (1979-1982) to provincial-level management in Misiones. This work examines why and how Lao refugees made Posadas their home while situating the analysis in Hemispheric Asian American approaches to Asian immigration and racialization in contemporary Latin America.

In this dissertation, I argue data sediments gendered histories of space and place. Through examining archives, datasets, and public records, I read for the patterns of brief mentions of Muslim women over time and space. I read the brief mentions of Muslim women as a part of the process of datafication cementing knowledge about them through these patterns. Across time and space, Muslim women are constantly rendered as passive victims in the archive-to-data cycle. Instead, I argue for a reading practice that centers these brief mentions as pushing against the limits of the archives and datasets.

Bringing together Global Asian Studies, Southeast Asian American Studies, Critical Refugee Studies, and queer studies, my dissertation Revolutionary Others: Migratory Subjects and Vietnamese Radicalism in the United States During and After the Vietnam War reconsiders Vietnam War historiography, which overgeneralizes anticommunist politics amongst Vietnamese refugees, to highlight the undercurrent history of Vietnamese diasporic radicalism enacted by refugees, activists, and artists, who organize for their futures against the increasing violence of the U.S. empire. This project argues that America’s contested relationships to the vast range of Vietnamese political actors throughout the Vietnam War era have shaped the long 1960s’ leftist social movements, undergirded America’s turn to neoliberal conservatism post-1980, and continued to inform the current political polarizations around Trump’s America. The Vietnamese diasporic radical left formation can be traced back to the late 1960s—including antiwar activism by South Vietnamese exchange students in the U.S., the leftist formation amongst second-generation refugee descendants, and the queer/feminist critique and refugee speculative imaginaries by Vietnamese American artists and writers. This history demonstrates an alternative genealogy of Vietnamese revolutionary politics outside the communist victory, rooted in past and ongoing engagements with cross-racial solidarities, queer people of color critique, and transnational feminist world-making. Based on three years of original multi-sited archival research and oral history interviews with Vietnamese/American activists in Vietnam and the United States, analyses of visual arts by Vietnamese American refugee and refugee descendant artists, and my auto/ethnography as a bilingual, transnational Vietnamese queer scholar, this interdisciplinary and mixed-methods research captures a multifaceted movement that exists on the streets, online, in art and intellectual spaces. While critical scholarship on U.S. militarism and refugeehood has focused on displacement, trauma, and the impacts of war in people’s public and intimate life, Revolutionary Others reminds scholars to take seriously the agency and world-building politics and radical politics based on community engagement, grassroots organizing, and political education that refugees and their descendants envision and enact.

“Somos Locos Respetosos”: A Bidirectional Ethnographic Project of Reclaimed Childhoods at Casa Asilio*, A Shelter for Unaccompanied Minors in Tijuana (2018-19) provides a space within Latin American studies to orally illuminate the experiences of unaccompanied minors in transit amid globalized ways of life and massive displacement. I theorize the process by which youth develop kin-ship ties, and by extension—their identities, to humanize themselves within the greater mechanism of the Caravan movement. I reconfigure the massiveness directed at the Caravan movement (and those who comprise it) by the Western media. In this work, I collect stories of survival from unaccompanied minors who travel from Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, and Guatemala to the Tijuana-San Diego border as well as the staff at Casa Asilio1. I freeze-frame the Caravan’s unaccompanied youth under the scope of Global political-economic forces that create social conditions in which violence, namely familial disintegration, is rendered natural. Upon their arrival at Casa Asilio, a shelter for unaccompanied minors in transit, I observe the construction of surrogate families, or kinship ties. Through the testimonies of the teens’ experiences, I empower their memories of each other as they actively create meaning within undesired circumstances. To safeguard their stories, all identifiable information (such as names of those involved in this study and the geographic setting of the interviews) has been given a pseudonym.