Finding Sequins in the Rubble: Mapping Latina Migrant Lesbian Journeys in(to) Los Angeles

In her research on sexually non-conforming Latinas, Katie L Acosta argues that scholars need to know more about Latinas' sexualities in all their complexities and that future scholarly work should address the pleasures and desires of Latina lesbians and explore the quality and stability of the relationships they nurture in the borderlands. Mainstream research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender Los Angeles has ignored Latinx queer communities until recently. Lesbian Latinas have been especially marginalized, particularly those who are migrants and refugees. Building on queer migrations research and using what Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio Roque Ramirez call “queer oral history,” this talk focuses on two everyday lesbians in LA whose stories add texture to the broader LA queer history and that of queer migrants in the city. The narratives of Luna and Dulce, two migrant lesbians from Mexico and Guatemala, respectively, tell us about the diverse experiences of migrant Latina lesbians in Los Angeles. Contextualizing their lives within a broader research on lesbian Latinas, this essay focuses on three themes: migration, leisure spaces, and family, and how these are part of their everyday choices and practices of freedom. Their stories have been instrumental in an interdisciplinary framework that I call “finding sequins in the rubble,” a theory of hope and self-fashioning which allows us to understand how queer Latinx communities engage in processes of ‘queer-world making’ and radical possibility through everyday acts of resilience and self-care in the midst of intimate, institutional, and state violence.