jorgesanchezcruz@g.harvard.edu

Bio

I am formerly undocumented and a native of the Central Valleys of Oaxaca (Mixtec/Zapotec region).

I am a scholar of race, gender, and sexuality in Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean literatures and cultures, particularly in how the afterlives of slavery and colonization condition minority populations. My work centers queer, trans*, indigenous, and undocumented theories and aesthetics.

Previously I was a visiting assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Before Harvard, I was a ACLS postdoctoral researcher in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Research

My current manuscript, Aesthetics of Repair: AIDS, Race, and Sexual Politics in the Americas, examines literary and cultural productions by artists, writers, and sexual militants during the 1980s and 1990s AIDS pandemic in Mexico and Chile to the end of showing the failures of democracy and the exclusions of liberalism. In this book, I also show that while often the AIDS crisis is seen and read through loss, death, and disappearance, this project offers reparative readings that re-imagines the pandemic by foregrounding aliveness, community practices, and a re-thinking of ethics and politics through the works of Mario Bellatin, Agustin Martínez Castro, Pedro Lemebel, Néstor Perlongher, and Claudia Rodríguez. A sample of this book is forthcoming this Fall 2023.

I also write, teach, and research about coloniality and Indigeneity (with an emphasis in Mexico) as well as Latinx studies, Latinx illegalities, and undocumented rights and politics.

Selected Publications

“Cuir Mourning and Mobilization in Times in Displacement,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Fall 2023.

“José Esteban Muñoz y lo marrón,” Revista La Tempestad, August 08, 2023.

“Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Worldbuilding. Cultivando Comunidad,” Co-authored with Andrés Triana Solórzano, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, vol. 22, no. 3, 2023.

“Trans* (Dis)appearance at the Mexican Frontier: Reading Refusal in Teresa Margolles’s Ya basta hijos de puta (2018),” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 9, no.4, 2022, pp. 540-562.

“Debility, Negative Affect, Mobility: Undocuqueer Aesthetics and the Right to Thrive,” Social Text, vol. 40, no. 2 (151), 2022, pp. 69-92.

Courses Taught

Protest and Decolonization in Latin America and the Caribbean (Spring 2024, Undergraduate, in English)

Performing Latinidad: Race, Sex and Excess in Contemporary U.S. Culture (Fall 2023, Undergraduate)

Queer, Trans*, and Feminism in the Americas (Spring 2023, Graduate)

Latin American Cinema (Spring 2023, Undergraduate)

Queer Indigeneity: North and South Conversations (Fall 2022, Undergraduate)

Decolonial Views, Decolonial Practices: Indigeneity and Protest in Latin America and the Caribbean (Fall 2021 & Fall 2022, Undergraduate; in Spanish)

Queer Latinidad: Race, Sex, and Power in the U.S. (Spring 2022, Undergraduate)

AIDS, Aesthetics, and Politics in Latin America (Spring 2022, Graduate)