Despite Yolanda Chávez Leyva’s call to “put Latina lesbian history at the center,” historians have been slow to do so. Celebrated works by writers like Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa as well as several notable anthologies offer access to queer Latinas’ voices through poetry, prose, theory, interviews, memoirs, and critical essays. However, as Lorena García and Lourdes Torres note, “While such works provide important insight into the sexual lives of Latinas, we are still in need of empirical research.”

This panel centers on the histories of Latina lesbians in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Facing familial tension and societal repression, Latina lesbians formed meaningful communities and political networks throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Three unique stories animate this work. Starting in midcentury New York City, young Puerto Rican lesbians encountered varied representations of queerness that informed how they understood themselves and developed community. In the early 1980s Los Angeles, the seeds of an autonomous lesbian political organization were planted. By 1986, Connexus/Centro de Mujeres operated two facilities in West Hollywood and East LA, yet tensions between white and Latina members drove the organization’s agendas and leadership in opposing directions. Turning to Chicago in the late 1980s, a young immigrant from Mexico navigated and rejected familial pressures to be an ideal daughter and wife and immersed herself in the community fostered by LLENA, a local organization for Latina lesbians to forge connections.

Taken together, these papers illuminate the nuances of each specific time and place while also examining shared experiences among these historical actors. The lives and personal relationships at the heart of each paper reveal the power and pain in community building for Latina lesbians in the twentieth-century United States.