Building on women of color feminists' frameworks that engage the complexities of race, class, gender, and sexuality, "Tracing Queer Latina Diasporas: Escarvando Historical Narratives of Ancestries and Silences" analyzes historical, literary, sociological, as well as other ethnic studies and feminist studies scholarship, and uses methods such as oral history and archival research next to analysis of visual representations, art, and museum visits that together map out an emerging analytic interpretive frame to trace queer Latina discourses of creativity and knowledge. Tracing the diasporas of "queer borderlands" highlights the forced migrations and colonizing of Latinas/os and Latin American communities. By racing the "queer" and queering the "Latina/o," the tensions and dialogues manifested in these historically diasporic and transnational identities and communities can be traced.

This project examines the often over looked yet intertwined legacies of Chicana feminisms and queer theory through the work of lesbian of color and queer women of color feminist formations. Tracing silences of non-heteronormative populations of color is a move to address colonial forms of epistemic violence. The chapters in this dissertation form archives to address the overarching question: How do women of color feminists knowledge production, decolonized methodologies, and representations of cultural memory assist in tracing and remembering hidden histories and silences of queer Latina/o ancestries?

Chapter one, "Decolonizing Aztlán: Unraveling Conflicting Colonial Histories of Land and Race to Trace Queer Ancestry" is a historical account that disrupts the usual story of colonization that is central to Chicano studies and instead searches for connections of race and land and complexities of gender and sexuality to open space for the exploration of queer ancestral histories. This chapter complicates the historical racial formation of the Mexican American through an analysis of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Chapter two, "Gloria Anzaldúa: Altars, Archives, and Opening up the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands" argues that Anzaldúa's classic text is an altar that functions as a guide for creativity and ceremony. Through a grounded analysis of racism and colonization, Anzaldúa opens an analysis of decolonization that includes gender, sexuality, and spirituality.

Chapter three, "Queer Latina Cultural Production: Remembering through Oral and Visual Storytelling" focuses on queer Latina and Indígena artists who use enact forms of remembering through their art (i.e. sculpture, film, theater, and painting) to regain cultural ancestral memory and story. The fusion and collaborative methodology of this work is reflective of feminist of color knowledges. While chapter four, "Tracing Latina Lesbiana Historias of Resistance, Solidarity, and Visibility" purports the importance of an early generation and network of women of color who did the work to construct visual archives in various forms, such as the production of anthologies, building archives, and documenting through photography, as a mode of establishing visibility for Latina Lesbiana in community and academic spaces.

Patricia Zavella was born in Tampa, Florida in 1949, the oldest of twelve children in a working-class family and often cared for her siblings. Her mother and father were both born in the United States and the primary language spoken in her family was English.  She spoke English to her maternal grandmother who was born in the U.S. Her father was in the air force and they moved frequently when she was a child. Zavella was often one of very few Mexican-American children in the schools she attended. Teachers were often “surprised” at Zavella’s stellar performance in the classroom. When she was ten years old, the family settled in Ontario in Southern California. It was here that there were more Mexican-Americans in her classrooms; this prompted her critical thinking about race relations and the Spanish language.

In 1968, Zavella went to Chaffey Community College, in Alta Loma near her family’s home. There she heard both Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez speak and became involved with the Chicano/a movement, developing into a student activist supporting some of the first classes in Mexican-American studies. Her recollections of these early days of the movement are a vital part of this oral history. Zavella participated in the Chicano Moratorium in August 1970, a demonstration of about 25,000 activists who protested in East Los Angeles against the Vietnam War. She joined MEChA [Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán] and began to claim an identity as a Chicana.

Zavella went on to complete her BA in anthropology at Pitzer College (one of the Claremont Colleges) and then attended graduate school at UC Berkeley, where she earned her PhD in anthropology in 1982. As a graduate student, she continued to be deeply involved in and inspired by the Chicano/a movement. Her dissertation Women’s Work in Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley developed into her first book. Through Zavalla’s reflection we learn of the influence social movements had on her identity formation and search for community-centered knowledge. Zavella was one of the first scholars to analyze the intersections of race, gender, class for Chicana women workers, a research approach that emerged from feminist of color activisms of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Before coming to UC Santa Cruz, Zavella taught courses at California State University at Hayward, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Barbara and worked as a postdoc researcher at Stanford University with the Center for Chicano Research. In 1983 she was hired by UCSC’s community studies program, first for a temporary position and after a year for a permanent position. Later she transferred to the Latin American and Latino Studies department. Zavella directed the Chicano and Latino Research Center from 1999 to 2003 and was a founder of both the BA and PhD program in the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. She has also served as UCSC’s representative to the UC Committee on Latino Research.

Zavella considers both her scholarship and her teaching forms of activism. Her research focuses on migration, gender and health in Latina/o communities, Latino families in transition, feminist studies, and ethnographic research methods.  She has worked on many collaborative projects, including an ongoing partnership with Xóchitl Castañeda with whom she has written four articles, two in English and two in Spanish. In 2010, the Society for the Anthropology of North America awarded Zavella the Distinguished Career Achievement in the Critical Study of North America Award. She has published many books including, most recently, I'm Neither Here Nor There, Mexicans' Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty (Duke University Press, 2011), which focuses on working class Mexican Americans’ struggle for agency and identity in Santa Cruz County.

Olga Nájera-Ramírez was born in 1955 and raised in the small town of Davenport, California. She is the fourth of six children. In the early 1950s, her parents came to the United States from the state of Durango, Mexico, part of a migration of Mexican-Americans to the North Coast of Santa Cruz County. Her father worked in the fields and at the Davenport Cement Plant. When Nájera-Ramírez was eight, her father died and her family labored in the fields along with finding other jobs to support themselves. Her mother worked in packing sheds and canneries in several places in Santa Cruz County. This oral history begins with Nájera-Ramírez’s recollections of growing up in Davenport. Nájera-Ramírez’s early labor as a farmworker and the importance she placed on creating familia within the community in Davenport grounds her later vision of facilitating access to the university system for people of diverse locations.

Even as a small child in Davenport, Najera-Ramírez was interested in becoming a teacher. Her high school counselor held what Nájera-Ramírez’s termed “a paternalistic view of the minorities” and discouraged her from pursuing an advanced education in academia. But Nájera-Ramírez persevered, and despite a lack of mentors or even financial advising, became the first in her family to attend a four-year college, entering UC Santa Cruz as a student in Merrill College in 1973.

As a UCSC student, Najera-Ramírez danced with Los Mejicas which galvanized what would become a lifelong interest in conducting research on the dance and traditions of Mexico and Mexican folklore. She earned a dual degree in history and Latin American studies from UC Santa Cruz in 1977. Nájera-Ramírez remembers the Chicano/Latino graduation feeling like a family party—this speaks simultaneously to the small numbers of Chicanas and Latinos graduating in 1977, as well as to importance of music, food, and cultura within a university setting to sustain people of color. Her recollections of Chicano/a Latino/a life at UCSC in the 1970s, as well as her faculty mentors and classes, are an invaluable contribution to a little-documented aspect of UCSC history.

Najera-Ramírez's involvement with Los Mejicas during her undergraduate career in 1976 gave her the opportunity to meet Rafael Zamarripa, a well known folklorico maestro, in Colorado. As a result of this life-altering meeting, Najera-Ramírez decided to attend University of Guadalajara and further study dance. After three years, she returned to the United States and attained her MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas in 1983. She also married her husband, Ronaldo  Ramírez in that year. In 1987, Najera-Ramírez earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of Texas, with a specialization in folklorico studies.

Nájera-Ramírez is perhaps unique among UCSC faculty in that she is a native of Santa Cruz County who attended UC Santa Cruz, and then returned to her alma mater for a lifelong career as a tenured professor. In 1989, Nájera-Ramírez was hired by UCSC’s anthropology department, where she has now taught for twenty-five years. She is also a founder of UCSC’s Latin American and Latino Studies department and has directed the Chicano/Latino Research Center (CLRC). Striking in Nájera-Ramírez’s interview is her dedication to communities of color who are producing knowledge of “Greater Mexico” and beyond. This is evident primarily through her mentorship of graduate students of color, active guidance of Los Mejicas, and participation in cross-border projects of the CLRC.

Along with being a published writer, Olga is a film producer who has created two major films, La Charreada: Rodeo a la Mexicana and anza Folklórica Escénica: El Sello Artístico de Rafael Zamarripa (Mexican Folkloric Dance: Rafael Zamarripa’s Artistic Trademark). She describes the making of these two films in her oral history and demonstrates her dedication to visual arts and culture.

Najera-Ramírez has also served as the faculty advisor for Grupo Folklórico Los Mejicas of UCSC since 1997, which has been dancing folklorico since 1972. Los Mejicas fosters a strong sense of community at UCSC, thereby helping with the retention of Chicano/a and Latino/a students. The group performs at public schools throughout California and in the process does outreach to potential UCSC students of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Elba Rosario Sánchez was born 1949 in Atemajac, Mexico, a small town near Guadalajara. She is the oldest of three girls. Her father worked in the cotton mill until an accident injured one of his eyes. The accident sent him to the United States in search of work, first to Chicago, where the family had relatives, and then to San Francisco, where he worked as a bus boy at the Fairmount Hotel. After about eighteen months, he brought his family to San Francisco in 1960, where they lived at Divisidero and Pine, in a Black neighborhood. At the neighborhood elementary school, Elba was one of very few non-Black children; ironically, even as she struggled to adapt to a white-dominated country, in the racial definitions of that time she was considered white. She learned English quickly, and soon became the translator for her family.

Within a few years of her arrival, the social movements of the 1960s altered the national landscape. Witnessing the brutal repression of Black civil rights protestors on television was formative for Sánchez’s growing political consciousness and her eventual activism as a young supporter of the United Farm Workers movement. Her early activism with the United Farm Workers boycott on grapes was impressive, particularly since her family did not approve of her protest.  This activism grew intertwined with her passion for writing and for language. In the oral history, Elba vividly recalls that her first pieces of poetry were written on small pieces of paper that she then crumpled up and hid in a drawer.  Her first poem, “The Price of Color,” was published in her parochial high school’s yearbook.

After graduation, Sánchez attended San Francisco City College. There she was inspired by the Chicano activist spirit of several classmates who had been taking courses at San Francisco State College, where the student protests had shut the campus down. But after a semester and a half she dropped out of college to marry and have a child.

In the late 1970s, Sánchez and her husband relocated to Santa Cruz so that her husband could attend UC Santa Cruz. Sánchez became a bilingual counseling aide at Santa Cruz High School. In search of UCSC students who could serve as English tutors at Santa Cruz High, Sánchez met Paco Ramirez, a lecturer in Spanish who coordinated the tutorial program at Stevenson College and Paul Lubeck, a professor in sociology. Both encouraged her to return to college and finish her B.A., which she did, graduating in Latin American studies from Merrill College. At UCSC, Sánchez was a nontraditional student who lived off campus with her husband and her three-year-old child. This experience, plus the class and cultural differences between her and the mostly white middle-class student body of UCSC at that time, led to feelings of alienation and isolation.

Professor Roberto Crespi, Sánchez’s advisor in Latin American studies, encouraged her to go on to graduate school in literature at UCSC, which she did, earning her MA from UCSC. Crespi was one of very few Latino professors at UCSC in the early years of the campus. He was also one of the founders, with J. Herman Blake, of Oakes College. In 1979, Crespi also hired Sánchez as a tutor in the Spanish for Spanish Speakers Program (SPSS), which he had founded, and which was then only in its second year. Sánchez spent the next fifteen years teaching in, coordinating, and directing the multidisciplinary Spanish for Speakers Program. This pioneering, cutting-edge program, incorporated poetry readings, theatrical performances, cultural nights, political discussions, visual arts exhibitions, and small press publishing into its curriculum. Students studied Latin American history and literature in SPSS courses, and honed critical thinking, speaking, translation, and writing skills. Sánchez credits SPSS for higher levels of retention of Latino students at UCSC, and also for the successful careers of many of those students after graduation.

Also while at UCSC, Sánchez was one of the founding and primary editors of REVISTA MUJERES, a bilingual literary and visual arts journal published at UC Santa Cruz from January 1984 to 1993. According to their mission statement, “REVISTA MUJERES: In Our Words and Work, Our Vision,” REVISTA was

dedicated to interviews, poetry, essays, as well as visual art work and set a page in the history, struggles, and contributions of Chicana and Latina undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty members…REVISTA was also envisioned and produced as a response to the lack of access in mainstream publications for Chicana/Latina bilingual, budding as well as experienced writers, whose work was unpublished. Its aim was to promote and encourage a community of writers and artists, to plant a seed of reality and creativity.

Sánchez’s commitment to honor the Spanish language, teach Latin American history, and to offer a keen critique of colonization is part of her legacy on the UC Santa Cruz campus. This commitment was particularly evident in her fervent dedication to SSSP and the co-production of Revista Mujeres. In her oral history, Sánchez describes the organizational work that went into funding, editing, producing, and distributing this groundbreaking journal, which was distributed far beyond UCSC and was the first of its kind published in the state of California. Sánchez locates REVISTA in a cultural effervescence of Chicano-Latino writing and publishing in the 1980s and 1990s.  Sánchez recalls that at the time of her earliest publications, there were very few Chicana and Chicano writers who were published.

Sánchez’s own development as a writer flourished during that cultural flowering. She participated in a bilingual writer’s workshop in San Francisco with several other key Chicana and Chicano writers. She is the author or coauthor of several books of poetry including Tallos de luna /Moon Shots (Moving Parts Press, 1992), From Silence to Howl (Moving Parts Press, 1993) and is a contributor to many anthologies, including Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press, 2003), Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (Aunt Lute Books, 1990). She continues to write and is currently working on flash fiction and children’s books.

Elba Sánchez was interviewed in three sessions by Susy Zepeda in several locations in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. The interviews took place on February 8, 2013, March 1, 2013, and April 5, 2013. The interviews were transcribed by Irene Reti and a transcript was returned both to Zepeda, who audited it for accuracy of transcription, and Sánchez, who edited it for flow and accuracy, corrected the Spanish. Both Zepeda and Sánchez added some footnotes. We chose not to italicize the Spanish in the transcript, a political decision that recognizes that italics can “other” Spanish words as “foreign,” or non-normative. This is a style preferred by many Latino/a writers today.

It was an honor and a pleasure to interview Elba Sánchez. Her storytelling was full of heart, joy, and animation. Her oral history offers a sense of her strength, vision, and dedication to forms of resistance.

Olga Nájera-Ramírez was born in 1955 and raised in the small town of Davenport, California. She is the fourth of six children. In the early 1950s, her parents came to the United States from the state of Durango, Mexico, part of a migration of Mexican-Americans to the North Coast of Santa Cruz County. Her father worked in the fields and at the Davenport Cement Plant. When Nájera-Ramírez was eight, her father died and her family labored in the fields along with finding other jobs to support themselves. Her mother worked in packing sheds and canneries in several places in Santa Cruz County. This oral history begins with Nájera-Ramírez’s recollections of growing up in Davenport. Nájera-Ramírez’s early labor as a farmworker and the importance she placed on creating familia within the community in Davenport grounds her later vision of facilitating access to the university system for people of diverse locations.

Even as a small child in Davenport, Najera-Ramírez was interested in becoming a teacher. Her high school counselor held what Nájera-Ramírez’s termed “a paternalistic view of the minorities” and discouraged her from pursuing an advanced education in academia. But Nájera-Ramírez persevered, and despite a lack of mentors or even financial advising, became the first in her family to attend a four-year college, entering UC Santa Cruz as a student in Merrill College in 1973.

As a UCSC student, Najera-Ramírez danced with Los Mejicas which galvanized what would become a lifelong interest in conducting research on the dance and traditions of Mexico and Mexican folklore. She earned a dual degree in history and Latin American studies from UC Santa Cruz in 1977. Nájera-Ramírez remembers the Chicano/Latino graduation feeling like a family party—this speaks simultaneously to the small numbers of Chicanas and Latinos graduating in 1977, as well as to importance of music, food, and cultura within a university setting to sustain people of color. Her recollections of Chicano/a Latino/a life at UCSC in the 1970s, as well as her faculty mentors and classes, are an invaluable contribution to a little-documented aspect of UCSC history.

Najera-Ramírez's involvement with Los Mejicas during her undergraduate career in 1976 gave her the opportunity to meet Rafael Zamarripa, a well known folklorico maestro, in Colorado. As a result of this life-altering meeting, Najera-Ramírez decided to attend University of Guadalajara and further study dance. After three years, she returned to the United States and attained her MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas in 1983. She also married her husband, Ronaldo  Ramírez in that year. In 1987, Najera-Ramírez earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of Texas, with a specialization in folklorico studies.

Nájera-Ramírez is perhaps unique among UCSC faculty in that she is a native of Santa Cruz County who attended UC Santa Cruz, and then returned to her alma mater for a lifelong career as a tenured professor. In 1989, Nájera-Ramírez was hired by UCSC’s anthropology department, where she has now taught for twenty-five years. She is also a founder of UCSC’s Latin American and Latino Studies department and has directed the Chicano/Latino Research Center (CLRC). Striking in Nájera-Ramírez’s interview is her dedication to communities of color who are producing knowledge of “Greater Mexico” and beyond. This is evident primarily through her mentorship of graduate students of color, active guidance of Los Mejicas, and participation in cross-border projects of the CLRC.

Along with being a published writer, Olga is a film producer who has created two major films, La Charreada: Rodeo a la Mexicana and anza Folklórica Escénica: El Sello Artístico de Rafael Zamarripa (Mexican Folkloric Dance: Rafael Zamarripa’s Artistic Trademark). She describes the making of these two films in her oral history and demonstrates her dedication to visual arts and culture.

Najera-Ramírez has also served as the faculty advisor for Grupo Folklórico Los Mejicas of UCSC since 1997, which has been dancing folklorico since 1972. Los Mejicas fosters a strong sense of community at UCSC, thereby helping with the retention of Chicano/a and Latino/a students. The group performs at public schools throughout California and in the process does outreach to potential UCSC students of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Olga Nájera-Ramírez was interviewed in three sessions by Susy Zepeda at her home in Santa Cruz County. The interviews took place on May 2, May 16, and May 30, 2013. Nájera-Ramírez’s articulate reflections, warmth, and intellect facilitated powerful storytelling that offered a unique perspective from a lifelong connection with Santa Cruz County. The interviews were transcribed by Irene Reti and a transcript was returned both to Zepeda, who audited it for accuracy of transcription, and Nájera-Ramírez, who edited it for flow and accuracy. We chose not to italicize the Spanish in the transcript, a political decision that recognizes that italics can “other” Spanish words as “foreign,” or non-normative. This is a style preferred by many Latino/a writers today.

Copies of this volume are on deposit in Special Collections and in the circulating stacks at the UCSC Library, as well as on the library’s website. The Regional History Project is supported administratively by Elisabeth Remak- Honnef, Head of Special Collections and Archives, and Interim University Librarian, Elizabeth Cowell.

—Irene Reti, Director, Regional History Project, University Library

—Susy Zepeda, Interviewer, Regional History Project

University of California, Santa Cruz, April 11, 2014