José A. de la Garza Valenzuela is Assistant Professor in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Focusing on fiction by gay Chicano writers, his current research investigates the legal underpinnings of queer migrant narrative to shed light on experiences of migration and residence in the U.S. inaccessible through the state’s legal archive. More broadly, his interdisciplinary research and teaching focuses on Latinx literature, relational migration, and histories of legality with careful attention to questions of ethnicity, race, sexuality, and citizenship. Dr. de la Garza Valenzuela’s work has appeared in Latino Studies, MELUS, and American Literary History. His work has been recognized by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, the Modern Language Association's GLQ Caucus, the Queer/Trans Caucus of the American Studies Association, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is currently at work on a monograph tentatively titled Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions.
Dr. de la Garza Valenzuela is currently at work on a book-length manuscript tentatively titled Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions. The book traces the ways queer migrants and residents are managed not only through policy attending to migration, but also the legislation of sexuality. He argues the law produces legally-bearing fictions of queer migration against which queers, migrants, and queer migrants’ performances of legality are measured. In the context of this legal narrative crisis, he argues fictional works by queer Chicanx writers offer critical interrogations of the law that provide reliable extralegal portraits of queer experiences of migration occluded by the state’s legal fictions and the institutions that see to their enforcement.