Queering urban autonomy in greater Los Angeles: Latinx poli-creative survival strategies

Hernandez, Jessennya

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124647 Copy

Description

Title

Queering urban autonomy in greater Los Angeles: Latinx poli-creative survival strategies

Author(s)

Hernandez, Jessennya

Issue Date

2024-04-12

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Moussawi, Ghassan

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Moussawi, Ghassan

Committee Member(s)

• Mendenhall, Ruby
• Miles, Brittney S
• Vergara Bracamontes, Damian
• Flynn, Karen

Department of Study

Sociology

Discipline

Sociology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• urban studies
• Latinx
• queer worldmaking
• embodied knowledge

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study that examines how working class queer and femme Latinx artists from immigrant communities -whom I refer to as poli-creatives- use their creative labor to navigate their sociopolitical economic conditions across greater Los Angeles (LA). I contextualize LA as a transnational site with historical and ongoing structures of imperialism and settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, environmental racism, gentrification, and state violence that these poli-creatives and their communities must navigate. Based on participant observation and life history and informal interviews conducted in 2019 and 2020, I intervene in urban studies, gender and sexuality, and social movements scholarship by arguing for a rethinking of queer communities and resistance. While urban studies scholarship has employed the language of citizenship and focused on LGBT neighborhood-based models of queer resilience, I divert our attention to thinking about liberatory urban autonomies that are rooted in reciprocal care and survival. To do so, I introduce the concept of mycorrhizal assemblages that serves as a theoretical and analytical tool. Drawing on subterranean webs of mycelial fungal strands, mycorrhizal assemblages conceptualize how poli-creatives build a multifaceted ecosystem of informal creative economies and subaltern and decolonial knowledges rooted in a praxis of communal care: sharing resources, skills, political goals, and affective trauma to help each other and their local working-class Black and brown immigrant communities build sustainability and self-determination. Rather than depend on visibility and representations in public space, gayborhoods, or the neoliberal settler-colonial state and formal institutions for survival, I show how these assemblages invest in ancestral practices and healing, experiences of migration, intimate and accessible spaces, and bodily autonomy. I argue that these multiple, nonlinear, and regenerative ways of living and knowing lay down new soil for collective survival and build liberatory imaginations for queer worldmakings and a future otherwise.

Graduation Semester

2024-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Jessennya Hernandez

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