Histories of Circulation: Tracing Transnationalism among Mexican and Chicanx Feminist and Queer Organizing, 1970s–90s

1978 witnessed the birth of two gay liberation groups: Mexico City’s Frente de Acción Revolucionaria (FHAR) and Houston’s Gay Chicano Caucus. Publishing newsletters, participating in Pride parades, and advocating for political and social change, these organizations are fundamental to charting queer Mexican and Mexican-American history. Of course, they were not alone. The 1970s to early 1990s saw an upswell of both feminist and gay liberation activism amongst Mexicans in Mexico City and Mexican-Americans in the United States. Emerging in the wake of the Stonewall riots, the Chicano Movement, and Mexico City’s student movement and the Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexican and Chicana/o/x feminist and queer activists in this era found themselves at once forming new political communities and navigating tenuous relationships with the state. The FHAR and Gay Chicano Caucus were joined by Grupo Lambda, the Grupo Autónoma de Lesbianas Oikabeth, and the VIVA collective. Inchoate feminist and queer print cultures solidified through newspapers, journals, and literature like fem., La Boletina, Nuestro Cuerpo, Between Ourselves: A Women of Color Newspaper, Third Woman, and This Bridge Called My Back. Thus, this paper considers the historical convergence of this wave of activism and, in particular, the transnational politics that came to exceed the border between the United States and Mexico, Mexican and Mexican-American. Through new modes of circulation, members and activist organizations of these communities came to understand and learn from each other as they made socio-political demands on the state. This leaves me to ask why was there this proliferation of feminist and queer activist groups? How did Chicano nationalism shape the way queer and feminist Chicanx activists identified with Mexico and interacted with Mexican activists? How did the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the Mexican debt crisis impact these movements? The transnational currents that animated feminist and queer organizing across the U.S.-Mexico border encourages a new orientation to framing national histories of feminist and queer insurgence.

This poster will be visually organized through newspaper clippings of the first Pride parades in Mexico City, frontispieces and letterhead from queer and feminist publications, photos and artwork from these periodicals, and images of protest ephemera from groups like the FHAR. I will also include limited excerpts from articles to emphasize the print culture that was developing and offer viewers a chance to engage with my archival sources. I will also include a timeline of events pertinent to both U.S. and Mexican feminists and queer activists to help guide readers.