Aztlán Unprotected: Reading Gil Cuadros in the Aftermath of HIV/AIDS

“Aztlán Unprotected: Reading Gil Cuadros in the Aftermath of HIV/AIDS” examines what the gay Chicano writer Gil Cuadros, whose work depicts queer and Chicana/o communities living with HIV/AIDS in Los Angeles during the late 1980s and early 1990s, teaches us today, in a historical moment when the virus remains an urgent health concern among young, queer Latino men even as the dominant culture locates the crisis in the past. Challenging health care inequities and interrogating conceptions of “healthy” sexuality, Cuadros’s 1994 collection of prose and poetry, City of God, is profoundly relevant at a time when comprehensive health care access for vulnerable populations remains tenuous. Reading Cuadros in the purported aftermath of HIV/AIDS prompts us to face who can access the protection of a recognized political community (whether Aztlán or white gay communities) and who is left unprotected.