UCLA

In this thesis, I examine Chicana English Professor Lora Romero's life and death as a Stanford University haunting. A haunting that, I argue, has both epistemic and deadly consequences. These consequences include epistemic unconfidence and epistemic haunting. What I term epistemic unconfidence leads Chicanas/Latinas to deny not only their own knowledge or lose knowledge but subsequently also deny their own humanity. Epistemic haunting is both a methodology and a theoretical framework for understanding knowledge and ontology. I coin epistemic haunting as knowledge that continues to lurk and highlight a continuous, unsolved social violence.

I demonstrate that Stanford's epistemic haunting is a collective construction that impacts Chicana academics' lives. In this thesis, I expand on studies in hauntology, building on sociologist Avery Gordon's interpretation of "haunting." I contend that white heteropatriarchal epistemes continue to haunt Chicana academics. Through a comparative analysis of Lora Romero's life and death, alongside the Mexican and Chicana folkloric icon La Llorona (Weeping Woman), I demonstrate how the negation of queer Chicanas knowledge can lead to gendered, queered, and racialized violence in academia. As I interpret Romero's narrative, I show how she is a Llorona that the academy framed, but who nonetheless resisted these academic boundaries.