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230 15 Latina/o Transpopulations MARCIA OCHOA This essay attempts to review the existing literature on the subject of Latina/o transpopulations to describe trends in both the dynamics of these populations and published work on them, as well as to identify knowledge gaps and directions for future research. After more than twelve years of experience with the trans-Latina/o communities of San Francisco, as well as my own research on transgender existence in Latin America, I believed there to be a small but growing number of publications in various media documenting the lives of U.S. Latina/o transgender individuals and populations. I now realize that there are two substantial gaps on the face of this literature: first, no published monograph exists that focuses exclusively on any Latina/o transpopulation; second, there is a dearth of written and other archival forms of cultural production by trans-Latina/os themselves. The only two published autobiographical works of Latina/o trans persons I have located are A Low Life in High Heels: The Holly Woodlawn Story and Max Wolf Valerio’s recently published memoir of his transition from female to male (Valerio is Latino and Native American).1 In this essay, “trans” is a category that encompasses many terms used to describe living, dressing, or identifying—or some or all of these—as a member of a gender with which a person was not assigned at birth. This includes transsexual , transgender, and transvestite forms of social and personal identity.2 This essay includes a consideration of both female-to-male (FTM) and male-tofemale (MTF) trans individuals. I consider trans a broad category when looking at representations of people who lived in other times and within gender systems not overdetermined by Western binarism. As such, I want to be clear that my use of trans is not intended to claim any particular existence as part of a unitary project of trans identity; rather, I understand trans to be composed of many different forms of gendering, embodiment, and power relations. This review will draw from my empirical and personal experience of U.S. Latina/o trans people and communities, as well as an extensive literature search in humanities, social LATINA/O TRANSPOPULATIONS 231 sciences, public health, and film and video.3 First, I discuss the concept of transpopulation and how it applies to the topic of this chapter. Then, I review some of the dynamics of these populations, and finally, I discuss trends and gaps in the literature on Latina/o transpopulations. Transpopulations I once assumed the term “transpopulation” meant populations of trans people in the context of sexuality studies of U.S. Latina/os. After all, the field of population genetics uses the same term to refer to massive projects of migration (of genes, humans, and other organisms). Because this was the primary context in which this term had been used, I questioned what we stood to gain by understanding U.S. trans-Latina/os’ experience through the notion of populations. I have chosen to engage the term transpopulation in this essay. Although I remain skeptical about the term’s usefulness outside this academic context, I can think of a few reasons why the concept of populations might be useful here. First, as an empirical category, populations provide a bit of distance between the researcher and the subject of study. (I imagine a biologist standing in a marsh, studying flocks of birds.) This may be advantageous in that we are looking for general trends and expect diversity within populations. As such, the concept of populations allows us to keep the basic unit of analysis—whether that is individual experience, social networks, “community,” or group behavior—an open question. It is reminiscent of the public health and policy literature on HIV/ AIDS that identifies “behavior risk population” rather than relying on identification or self-representation. It is through this shift that we get a category such as “men who have sex with men” (MSM), to describe a wide range of behaviors and identities. Employing the term populations may also serve to signal some of this public health literature as well as literature and policy on the migration of Latin Americans to the United States. Finally, the term populations allows us to think outside of community and identification. Community and identity are tried-and-true rubrics of racial/ ethnic experience in the United States as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender , queer, and intersex (LGBTQI ) experiences. These categories, while...

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