The first anthology to focus exclusively on queer readings of Spanish, Latin American, and US Latina lesbian literature and culture, Tortilleras interrogates issues of gender, national identity, race, ethnicity, and class to show the impossibility of projecting a singular Hispanic or Latina Lesbian. Examining carefully the works of a range of lesbian writers and performance artists, including Carmelita Tropicana and Christina Peri Rossi, among others, the contributors create a picture of the complicated and multi-textured contributions of Latina and Hispanic lesbians to literature and culture. More than simply describing this sphere of creativity, the contributors also recover from history the long, veiled existence of this world, exposing its roots, its impact on lesbian culture, and, making the power of lesbian performance and literature visible.

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City is the first ethnography in English to focus primarily on women’s sexual and intimate cultures in Mexico. The book shows the transformation of intimacy in the lives of three generations of women in queer spaces in contemporary Mexico City, as their sexual citizenship changes, including references to same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination laws. The book shows how these individuals reconfigure relationships through marriage, polyamory, friendship, and sex. Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy suggests that “new” intimate cartographies are emerging in Mexico City, ultimately redefining relationships, gender, and mexicanidad. Building on ethnographic data collected over the past decade, including forty-five in-depth interviews with women between the ages of twenty-two and sixty-five participating in LGBT spaces, Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy shows how lesbian women (mainly cis, but some trans) negotiate friendship, same-sex marriage, polyamory, and sexual practices, reinventing love, eroticism, friendship, and ultimately the social organization of Latin American societies.

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City is the first ethnography in English to focus primarily on women’s sexual and intimate cultures in Mexico. The book shows the transformation of intimacy in the lives of three generations of women in queer spaces in contemporary Mexico City, as their sexual citizenship changes, including references to same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination laws. The book shows how these individuals reconfigure relationships through marriage, polyamory, friendship, and sex. Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy suggests that “new” intimate cartographies are emerging in Mexico City, ultimately redefining relationships, gender, and mexicanidad. Building on ethnographic data collected over the past decade, including forty-five in-depth interviews with women between the ages of twenty-two and sixty-five participating in LGBT spaces, Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy shows how lesbian women (mainly cis, but some trans) negotiate friendship, same-sex marriage, polyamory, and sexual practices, reinventing love, eroticism, friendship, and ultimately the social organization of Latin American societies.

Winner, 2018 ASFS (Association for the Study of Food and Society) Book Award, Edited Volume This collection of new essays offers groundbreaking perspectives on the ways that food and foodways serve as an element of decolonization in Mexican-origin communities. The writers here take us from multigenerational acequia farmers, who trace their ancestry to Indigenous families in place well before the Oñate Entrada of 1598, to tomorrow’s transborder travelers who will be negotiating entry into the United States. Throughout, we witness the shifting mosaic of Mexican-origin foods and foodways in the fields, gardens, and kitchen tables from Chiapas to Alaska. Global food systems are also considered from a critical agroecological perspective, including the ways colonialism affects native biocultural diversity, ecosystem resilience, and equality across species, human groups, and generations. Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements is a major contribution to the understanding of the ways that Mexican-origin peoples have resisted and transformed food systems. It will animate scholarship on global food studies for years to come.

The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Florida The word tortillera means lesbian in Español. The moniker is familiar to most Spanish speaking cultures, but especially particular to the Cuban experience. In most Cuban-American households to be called a tortillera (whether one is one or not) is the gravest of insults, the basest of adjectives, a cat call that whips through the air like a lash whose only intention is to wound, to scar. Many a first-generation, Cubanita (the ones who are into other girls, anyway) has suffered, denied, wailed over the loaded term, but in Caridad Moro-Gronlier’s debut collection, Tortillera, she not only applies the term to herself, she owns it, drapes it over her shoulders and heralds her truth through candid, unflinching poems that address the queer experience of coming out while Cuban. The first half of the book immediately plunges the reader into the speaker’s Cuban-American life on-the-hyphen through vivid, first person narratives that draw one in, making the reader privy to the moments that mold the speaker’s experience: marginalization at a teacher-parent conference; the socioeconomic distinctions at assorted Quinceañera celebrations; a walk down the aisle toward divorce amid a back drop of wedding registries and Phen-Phen fueled weight-loss; post-partum depression; a peek into a No-Tell motel that does tell of the affair she embarks upon with her first female lover; the agony of divorce vs. the headiness of sex and lust; the evolution of an identity in verse. Part reckoning, part renewal, part redemption, part rebirth, the poems in Tortillera come clean, but more than that, they guide, reveal and examine larger considerations: the role of language on gender its subsequent roles, the heartrending consequences of compulsory heterosexuality, as well as the patriarchal stamp emblazoned on the Cuban diaspora. The work contained in Tortillera befits its audacious title—bold, original and utterly without shame. ... from “Unpacking the Suitcase” Once a year you watch West Side Story on the screen of your parents’ 1974 Zenith and catch a glimpse of yourself on television. You are the first born gringa in the family. Your English is perfect, but you’re not like your friends. You don’t go to slumber parties or play-dates, you don’t join the Brownies or take ballet, but once a year you get to live in Technicolor and root for the Sharks because they speak Spanish, too.

A-to-Z overview of modern Latina lesbian authors and performers in the United States, Latin America, and Spain. This book has been co-published simultaneously as Journal of Lesbian Studies, volume 7, number 3 (2003).

An exploration of queer Madrid's physical and symbolic literary culture.