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My research and teaching examine the overlaps between youth literatures and media, queer studies, Latine[1] studies, and screen cultures. My viewpoints been shaped by my engagement with multiple fields of study (including English, gender studies, pedagogy, and linguistics), my experiences growing up queer in rural Puerto Rico, and the (im)possibilities I experienced (and continue to experience) in academia as a first-generation scholar.

Moving from New Jersey to Puerto Rico as a child challenged me in ways that are hard to describe. I had to learn a new language, live in culture with different norms and social expectations, endure an elementary school system where corporal punishment against students was common and everyday, and grapple with the effects of colonization embedded in the very geopgraphy and social structure of the island. My emerging queerness only complicated my sense of confusion and dissonance, further compounding that characteristic sense of liminality that people often experience when moving to a different cultural context.

a lush green field with a small brown cow standing in the middle
This was the view from the front yard of my childhood home in Puerto Rico. My father’s cow, Coco, was our resident lawnmower and home mascot.
My childhood home used to be surrounded by flamboyanes.

Books, films, and video games became my means to escape and cope with the realities of my world. Sometimes, texts became a means to transgress the sociocultural limitations of my contexts. Through reading and examining books and media, I learned to use humor, knowledge, writing, and creative outlets as a source of both pleasure and survival. I traced cartographies to navigate a world that was unfamiliar to me, a world that refused to provide me with a language or framework to think about my queerness, and how it affects how I feel about my Latinidad, my future, my body, my dreams, and my “place” in the world. Literature, film, and videogames offered me a template to help trace my own map.

My teaching and research focus on the study of queer literatures and media crafted for younger audiences, with a specific interest in how queer children’s and teen cultures use language, aesthetic devices, imagery, and structure to narrativize queer and trans youth. My work is reparative and critical in scope, and it centers on matters of queer worldbuilding, historical memory, and futurism. I use queer texts as a platform to think critically about queer communities, politics, history, and the tensions that exist between matters of queerness and normative ideas of childhood and adolescence. I frequently find myself highlighting how queer texts, films, and video games can push us to think and feel differently about our place in time and our future orientations. My teaching is especially informed by my experiences studying English education at the graduate level, where I was able to think deeply about different methods for engaging with learning in the classroom.

person sitting in desk in front of a chalkboard. A laptop and computer bag are placed on the desk
I’ve been teaching independently designed college-level courses since I was 22-years-old. I taught introductory literature courses at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus, which was one of my most formative experiences as an educator. The MA in English Education program offered me resources to connect my research and teaching in unforeseen ways. Here’s a picture of me on the first day I ever taught a college-level class independently. I. Was. Terrified.

I completed my graduate studies at institutions with no core focus on youth studies or literatures. I often had to make the stakes of examining children’s and teen texts legible to my peers and mentors by drawing deep connections between different fields and by continuing to develop my teaching skills. Through the guidance of many mentors and supporters, I was trained to connect youth lierature to fields such as queer theory, gender studies, materiality studies, narratology, and post-1945 US fiction. I learned to not only think and work in an interdisciplinary fashion, but also to make the stakes and significance of my work transparent and accessible to audiences outside of my immediate fields. I read queer teen literature alongside queer texts and media crafted for older audiences, and I push others to think about these works with a plurality of times, contexts, and perspectives in mind. Furthermore, I view both research and teaching as opportunities to help others develop a language and framework that they can draw from in develop ing their own life cartographies.

As a PhD student at the University of Notre Dame, I was given the chance to teach across multiple disciplines, including courses on writing and rhetoric, young adult literature, and gender studies. Here, I’m guiding a discussion for an Introduction to Gender Studies course focused on gender, sexuality, and labor in Western contexts back in 2015 (photo credit Suzi García).

My current research and teaching are largely informed by the following set of questions: 

  1. What are the emancipatory possibilities and limitations present in queer content crafted for different audiences? How do youth audiences and cultural phenomena determine what can or can’t be expressed in a queer text at a given historical moment?
  2. To what extent can queer youth literatures help readers to question (and potentially challenge) the normative and harmful attitudes, binaries, ideologies, and practices present in contemporary cultures, especially given that they are crafted within neoliberal contexts? 
  3. What is the role of space and time in our understanding of contemporary queer texts and cultures? How do queer youth texts push us to think differently about the past, present, and future, especially when considering who creates this literature, who it is written for, and who actually reads it?
  4. What is the role of feeling and emotion in representations of queer communities, practices, and experiences? How do queer texts appeal to our emotions and how are these appeals marked by notions of gender, sexuality, age, race, and class? How can different texts and media push us to think critically and creatively about the relationship between queerness and developmental categories such as childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age? 

I am currently enjoying my time teaching and researching at Bowdoin College, where I’m given the flexibility to develop courses and research projects using unorthodox and underexplored methods. Currently, I’m developing an introductory textbook focused on the examination of young adult literature and culture from the perspectives of identity, history, pedagogy, and industry. I am also in the early stages of preparing a monograph focused on examining the cultural impact of Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Aristotle and Dante series in the field of youth literatures. I’m currently developing a seminar focused on queer Latinidades in US literature and film, and another focused on examining categories of age and development.

Academics aside, I enjoy cooking, indoor gardening, amateur geology and mineral collecting, amateur astronomy, video games, and spending time with my partner and cats.

a cluster of plants and orchids arranged indoors
I’m fond of growing orchids similar to the ones around my childhood home. I currently am growing over 18 different species of orchid around my house!
two cats staring out a window
A huge shout out to my pandemic emotional support team. Here they are enjoying the rare sunny day in Maine.

[1] I use the term “Latine” as a gender-neutral alternative to terms such as “Latina” and “Latino.” Although Latinx has gained much traction in its use over the past couple of years, particularly in academic settings, I use Latine instead because it is much easier for Spanish speakers to pronounce, and I want to honor both of the languages I grew up speaking.

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