In the Shadows of the Freeway: Growing Up Brown & Queer:

by Lydia R. Otero

Overview

Born in 1955, Lydia R. Otero knew they were queer the moment their consciousness had evolved enough to formulate thoughts. Nicknamed La Butch by their family, Otero shares a unique perspective: displaced by their queerness, but rooted in place through their relationship with Tucson, Arizona. In this book, which combines personal memoir and the historical archive, Otero takes readers to a world that existed on the physical and social margins and describes how a new freeway created a barrier that greatly influenced formative aspects of Otero's childhood. The author examines the multiple effects of environmental racism, while the lack of services and low expectations of the schools Otero attended are further examples of the discrimination directed at brown people. This book offers more self-disclosure than Otero's previous works, as the author's memories and experiences of childhood take center stage. Otero reveals the day-to-day survival mechanisms they depended upon, the exhilaration of first love, and the support they received from key family members

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781734118001
Publisher:	Planet Earth Press
Publication date:	11/26/2019
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.48(d)

About the Author

In 2019, Arizona's César E. Chávez Holiday Coalition awarded to Lydia R. Otero the Dolores Huerta Legacy Award for their activism and scholarship focusing on bringing awareness to Mexican American and local history. Being born and raised in Tucson with deep family roots on both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border inspired the author's interest in regional history. In 2011, the Border Regional Library Association presented a Southwest Book Award to Otero for La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City. The author is currently a tenured professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona.

Editorial Reviews

Otero's deeply compelling, meticulously researched, powerful memoir will resonate with many. Through masterful storytelling, the author unflinchingly explores themes of connection and disconnection, racism, erasure, queerness, struggle, joy, trauma, heartbreak, and love. Otero weaves their personal narrative with familial and municipal histories that were profoundly impacted by the destructive forces of white power structures that demolished neighborhoods in the twentieth century.

Zócalo Magazine co-founder - Jamie Manser

A poignant, humorous and sometimes tragic coming of age memoir of sexual identity and racial and cultural awareness and empowerment in an historic era of great social change in Tucson. It tells a story that has not been told. A must read!

Author of Beloved Land: An Oral History of Mexican Americans in Southern Arizona and Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral - Patricia Preciado Martin

Historian Lydia Otero employs the first person perspective to write themselves into the history of a working class barrio's devastation and endurance. Written with a cool, unpretentious ease, Otero's memoir makes a notable contribution to Queer and Latinx Studies while also reaching wide audiences interested in the politics of urban planning and development from a brown queer lens. This is queer of color theory born in the body and borders of the Southwest. A vital, unique, powerful memoir.

Author of The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History - Emma Pérez