“Archives of Nepantla” explores Chicana feminist philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa’s intellectual, affective, and spectral legacy through a critical engagement with UCSC’s Gloria Anzaldúa Altares Collection and the University of Texas-Austin’s Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. Drawing from her book manuscript Latinx Hauntings, Brenda Lara places Anzaldúa within a broader conversation on queer Latinx scholars whose untimely deaths unveil cycles of unresolved violence in academia. Lara theorizes materiality in Anzaldúa’s collections—altares, manuscripts, and autohistorias—as haunting spaces that negotiate mourning and remembrance. Brenda Lara’s talk reveals the reverent narratives and spectral knowledge that reframes the borderlands between life and death in institutional archives and resistant histories.
Brenda Lara is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz’s Literature Department and an incoming Assistant Professor at San Diego State University. She received her Ph.D. in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from UCLA. Her research intersects haunting and Chicana Feminism to analyze queer Latinx scholars’ deaths and legacies. She has been awarded the Inter-University Program for Latino Research Mellon Fellowship and Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies Fellowship. Lara has published work in the award-winning collection Monsters & Saints (2024), Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, and Camino Real: Estudios de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas.
Date | Time
May 14, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public
Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz