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Abstract: Using oral histories, this article reappropriates the concept of home to conceptualize it as a space of survival in the lives of LGBTQ Latinx migrants in Los Angeles, California, and migrant returnees in Mexico City, Mexico. It presents the process of homebuilding as a personal and inward protest against intersecting forms of systemic violence. Keywords: homebuilding, survival, intersecting forms of violence, migration, deportation.
For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such as that of North America, is an act of resistance.
-Cheryl Clarke
LGBTQ people are among the many who have historically migrated in and out of the United States and were largely invisible until recent decades. Reasons for migrating have ranged from economic to seeking escape from anti-LGBT violence (Rodríguez 2003; Randazzo 2005). This article is part of a larger research project on LGBTQ Latinx migrants in Los Angeles, California, and Mexico City, Mexico, and their experiences with migration, displacement, and homebuilding. My research looks closely at how immigration, asylum, and deportation are mediated by gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Using oral histories and participant observation, I investigate how LGBTQ migrant communities create strategies for survival. In this article, I specifically address the ways in which LGBTQ Latinx migrants living in Los Angeles and LGBTQ Mexican migrant returnees in Mexico City have used homebuilding-or the active verb of homing-as a strategy of resistance against displacement, isolation, marginalization, and exclusion as migrants in the United States and Mexico.1
I borrow from Women of Color feminisms to present the narrators' resistance as a form of protest. While it may not be considered direct action, I argue that their battles of protests are more personal and inward processes that reclaim home as a space of survival (Lugones 2005; Lorde 1978; Anzaldúa 1999). Queer feminists of color have long presented the act of survival by women and queer people of color as feminist resistance (Lorde 1997; 2007; Moraga and Anzaldúa 2002). I propose homing as a resistance that pushes against patriarchal, cis-hetero-patriarchal, capitalist, and ableist systems that build and maintain borders, deeming racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies disposable. Black feminist writer and poet Audre Lorde, when speaking to and about black women in her poem "A Litany...