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

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sociology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Hernandez, Jessennya

Contributors dc:contributor

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

• Urban Studies
• Latinx
• Queer Worldmaking
• Embodied Knowledge

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Jessennya Hernandez

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124647