UCLA

Queer Latinx Regeneration: Boyle Heights and the Geographies of Gentrification traces the contestations that arise from gentrification and the queer racialized bodies at the core of these debates. Queer Latinx Regeneration asks: What is possible when we center queer Latinx bodies in understanding processes of gentrification? What does queers-of-color place-making look like in the gentrifying barrio? This dissertation explores these inquires in Boyle Heights, a low-income immigrant Latinx neighborhood that has made national headlines for anti-gentrification community actions. Drawing from four years of ethnographic field work, qualitative interviews, and community-engaged anti-gentrification collaborations, this dissertation provides a critical textual analysis of contemporary cultural works and places – queer bars, queer performance art, pride, and muralism – in order to capture the complex ways queerness is mobilized in Boyle Heights. From queers of color banished from the neighborhood as gentrifying threats, to Latinx entrepreneurs creating new spaces to party and play, and brown queer artists straddling the contested terrains of artwashing, Queer Latinx Regeneration points to the relationship between urban renewal and queer-of-color mobility as a contested terrain of spatial belonging.