This project is a cartography of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Latino/a Los Angeles, mapping alternative spaces-physical, ephemeral and performative- of queer Latina/o life in Los Angeles. This interdisciplinary project uses a feminist and queer of color approach to the analysis of Latina/o urban space, situating US Third World feminists and the narrators in my research as critical geographers and social semioticians. In the first chapter I argue that LGBTQ or "queer" brown LA, as a borderlands space, is a transnational site of gendered, raced and sexed processes and as such has experienced epistemological, curricular, representational and physical, omissions and erasures. Some of us have literally been removed. Stemming from legacies of colonialism, nationalisms and neo-liberalism, queer transnational Latina/o LA has been rendered invisible by homonationalist, racist, mainstream narratives that represent "gay LA" as white, middle class, and male.

The second chapter focuses on methodology and functions as the "decolonial" chapter. Based on Chela Sandoval's "methodology of the oppressed", I trace the various technologies that LGBTQ Latinas/os employ to resist erasures and engage in processes of self-craft. I offer an interdisciplinary theoretical framework called "finding sequins in the rubble", a method and process that involves negotiating spaces, identities, and violence faced daily in this globalized, urban and rapidly gentrifying city. I argue that "reading" the queer city is a decolonizing process that involves multiple decolonial strategies for survival and self-fashioning, within and against, the erasures and violence of globalization, and hegemonic institutions and structures.

Chapter 3, through photographs, spoken word, visual art and oral histories, looks at the 2006 immigrant rights marches in Los Angeles, and how LGBTQ activists and immigrants reterritorialized the city streets, creating an alternative, urban cartography, enacting "performances of memory". The fourth chapter maps the social landscape of religion and spirituality in LA, tracing how LGBTQ Latinos/as negotiate their spiritual lives. It focuses on two lesbian narrators, Glenda Cael, a Guatemalan immigrant who was raised in the evangelical church, and Maria Teresa Maynez Bodtcher, an ex-Mormon Chicana. Focusing on oral history interviews, literary analysis, and cemetery and grave markers as texts, the last chapter looks at AIDS and HIV, especially in the 1980s and nineties, and how its history is remembered and erased in the city.