In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Q I started my field research on lesbian, bisexual, and queer Latinas at a difficult point in my life. My beloved grandmother had recently died, and on her deathbed she told her best friend that she lamented the fact that she would not get a chance to meet the new grandchild whose arrival the family was so anxiously awaiting. The grandchild she referred to is my aunt’s daughter, whom her partner had conceived via alternative insemination six months earlier. The statement that my grandmother made on her deathbed was the closest she had ever come to publicly acknowledging my aunt and her partner of more than ten years as a family. It was the first time my grandmother had ever acknowledged that the child they were bringing into the world, while not tied to her biologically, would indeed be her grandchild. Months after the funeral, I continued to return to this incident in my head. I thought about the tacit relationship my family had with my aunt: the way they never acknowledged her lesbian existence while all the while accepting her partner as part of the family. I had been well trained in these tacit arrangements, never mentioning my own relationships with women to anyone in the family. For them, alternative sexualities was a tacit subject; even when it was understood, it was never discussed, and through the lack of verbalization we maintained familial ties (Decena 2011).1 These experiences solidified my desire to conduct research on lesbian, bisexual, and queer Latinas.2 At this point, through my own experiences and those I had witnessed in my family, it had occurred to me that no one was writing about the curious ways that Latinas negotiate sexuality and the family. Throughout my research, in interview after interview, study participants shared remarks like those provided by Luisa above. As I sat down with the massive amounts of data I had collected through both participant observation and in-­depth interviews,it became clear that the study participants shared a collective Introduction I was raised that your family is the most important thing. And it wouldn’t feel right for me to not have my family around, even though they are the only ones that cause me pain. —­ Luisa, a bisexual Ecuadorian woman 2 Amigas y Amantes familial experience. While they did not always envision themselves as a unified group or even as part of the same community, they shared an experience in the ways in which they negotiated the family. This negotiation has become the centerpiece of this book. Amigas y Amantes approaches an understanding of how lesbian, bisexual, and queer Latinas live and operate in their daily lives while managing the conflicting needs of families of choice and those of origin. Employing an intersectional lens, I explore the ways that race, class, gender, nationality, and sexuality are interrelated in shaping lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) Latinas’ experiences with their families. Amigas y Amantes traces sexually nonconforming Latinas’ relationships with partners, families of origin, children, and friends. It provides a gendered analysis of how these women develop and maintain sexual identities, reconcile their sexualities with family members, negotiate cultural expectations, and combat compulsory heterosexuality. In accordance with feminist standpoint theory, this work uses the lived experience as a site for the production of knowledge (Harding 2004; Smith 1987). For Dorothy Smith, this experience becomes a point of entry for the scholar to begin to understand the relations of ruling that land in women’s lives. Following this premise, I am committed to validating women’s experiences as a legitimate source for knowledge production and challenging the relations of ruling that have silenced the voices of sexually nonconforming Latinas. One does not need to look beyond the academy to see the ways in which sexually nonconforming Latinas have been silenced. In this day and age, despite the many advancements made by gender and sexualities scholars alike, there continues to be a marked absence of nonwhite sexually nonconforming women in scholarship. The research on nonheterosexual women has overwhelmingly focused on white and middle-­ class groups (notable exceptions include Arguelles and Rich 1984; Espín 1997; Moore 2011; Zavella 2003a, 2003b). In addition to this fact, research on Latina/o sexualities and same-­ sex relationships has focused overwhelmingly on men (Almaguer 1993; Cantú 2009; Díaz 1998). While empirical work on Latina lesbians is nearly absent, there is a wealth of creative work being done in this area. Scholars like Cherrie Moraga and Gloria...

Share