Joteando y mariconadas: theorizing queer pláticas for queer and/or trans Latinx/a/o research

Abstract

The increasing scholarship on queer Latinx/a/o people in higher education research demands scholars to propound epistemologies and methodologies throughout the inquiry process that centers such communities. Methodologies, such as feminista pláticas disrupt epistemological boundaries to traditional ways of knowing and thus offer an opportunity to engage its application for queer and/or trans Latinx/a/o people. In this article, we foreground this opportunity through conexiones across the literature that highlight how feminista pláticas are employed for queer and/or trans Latinx/a/o communities in higher education research. As joto scholars, we conceptualize what this expansion can look like and build on the original contours of feminista pláticas to theorize queer pláticas through five contours: (1) jotx/a/o identity and consciousness, (2) space for querencia (care), (3) queer chisme, (4) conocimiento to joteria identity consciousness, and (5) mundo zurdo as queer futurity. We offer examples from our own research and provide reflexiónes for future scholarship.

Keywords:

• Queer pláticas
• querencia
• queer chisme
• jotería
• conocimiento
• epistemology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We bring attention to the fact that queer as an identity term is used to capture a grouping of those that live beyond binary ideas of gender and sexuality while also noting its roots from middle class White cis-men. This tension is one we continually navigate and explore, we use this term along with others reflecting on Anzaldúa’s (2009) To (o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana where she shares, “I struggle with naming without fragmenting, without excluding. Containing and closing off the naming is the central issue of this piece of writing” (p. 166).

2 We use queer and/or trans Latinx/a/o peoples throughout to capture the fluidity between gender and sexuality and the overlapping identities that can exist. For example, one can be queer and Latina, or trans and Latina, or queer and Latinx. We hope this phrasing helps allow space for self-identification of our readers.

3 We use feminista pláticas throughout this manuscript to refer to Chicana Latina Feminista Pláticas.

4 You will see us use terms like joto, jota, jotx, maricon, marimachas, and trasvesti as terms often used in a derogatory matter by cishet peoples but often reclaimed by our own peoples and community that carry with them the realities of existing within the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality within societal structures (see Alvarez & Estrada, 2019; Gómez, 2016; Pierce et al., 2021; Rizki, 2019).

5 Anzaldúa (2015) theorizes this coalition of us (nosotras) and the other (otras), nos/otras, to expose how this division of us and them is created in society and given our bodies in certain places, at certain times, in any moment can become us and them, at the same time both and at other times one or the other.

6 Anzaldúa’s (2002) conocimiento framework is built on a foundation of seven stages, one that requires the act of searching, inquiring, and healing (Anzaldúa, 2015). It emphasizes the identity and sociopolitical development of individuals, specifically through a racialized queer lens towards consciousness (Anzaldúa, 2002; Gaxiola Serrano et al., 2019).

7 In Chapter 6 of Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro, Anzaldúa (2015) highlights the Coyolxauhqui and the role it plays towards conscious rising of self. Anzaldúa (2015) the Coyolxauhqui imperative, “is the process of emotional psychical dismemberment, splitting body/mind/spirit/soul, and the work of putting all the pieces together in a new form, a partially unconscious work done in the night by the light of the moon, a labor of revisioning and remembering” (p. 124).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ángel de Jesus Gonzalez

Ángel de Jesus Gonzalez, Ed.D. is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Southern California in the Pullias Center for Higher Education. He was an inaugural Pedagogy Fellow at the Center for Black, Brown, Queer Studies and recently earned their Ed.D. in Community College Leadership at San Diego State University (SDSU). Their work is rooted in this narrative of growing up in South East Los Angeles as queer brown boy, a joto, who has experienced and witnessed how inequities embedded in schooling and various systems of oppression prohibit access and mobility for a different life. To do so, their work examines the conditions, experiences, and outcomes in community colleges for minoritized students with an emphasis on LGBTQIA+ and Latinx/a/o students.

Roberto C. Orozco

Roberto C. Orozco, Ph.D. is a President's Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities. He was a Ford Dissertation Fellow and completed his doctoral work in Higher Education at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. He is a first-generation joto in his familia and his ways of knowing and showing up is particularly guided by his upbringing as a Mexicano in Iowa. He asserts his centering of a queer Latino identity as guiding who he is and how he engages with his scholarly and community work alongside queer Latinx/a/o student activists. His work is central to the concept of time and space which is why he is committed to the queer Muxerista community in Las Vegas, who have informed his dissertation research and have challenged his way of knowing and being as a joto.

Sergio A. Gonzalez

Sergio A. Gonzalez is a fourth year doctoral candidate in the School of Education Studies Program at Claremont Graduate University. He writes from the core of who he is: joto, Latinx, feminist, hijo de a first-generation Madre and Mexican Immigrant Padre, jotería scholar, activist. As Lorde (2007) states, “I HAVE COME to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood” (p. 40). For this reason, his connection to jotería derives from his experiences navigating the Ivory Tower and trying to understand where he can exist within that space. As a scholar/activist, he focuses on co-creating counternarratives of queer Latinx/a/o individuals within higher education.