Key Concepts & Terms
This is Pérez’s term for rethinking history outside colonial frameworks.
What is the decolonial imaginary?
Pérez says these people are especially erased from borderlands history.
Who are queer people of color / queer Chicanas/os?
This agency was created in 1924 to police the U.S.–Mexico border.
What is the Border Patrol?
This research method relies on people telling their own stories.
What are oral histories?
This scholar wrote Borderlands/La Frontera
Who is Gloria Anzaldúa?
This "look" challenges white, heterosexual ways of interpreting the past.
What is the decolonial queer gaze?
These types of records usually make sexuality look only heterosexual.
What are marriage, court, and church records?
This 1896 Supreme Court case legalized racial segregation.
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
Pérez suggests examining people labeled as this to uncover hidden queer histories.
What is “deviance”?
Traditional Chicano history often focused on labor, immigration, and nationalism instead of this topic.
What is sexuality?
This term from Muñoz describes surviving dominant culture without fully resisting or assimilating.
What is disidentification?
Pérez says historians must pay attention to these in archives.
What are silences and gaps?
Pérez links sexual regulation with this form of scientific racism.
What is eugenics?
This phrase means interpreting documents beyond their intended meaning.
What is reading against the grain?
This Chicana scholar helped shift history toward women’s hidden labor and agency, influencing Pérez’s work.
Who is Deena González?
This ideology links whiteness, colonial power, and heterosexual norms.
What is white colonial heteronormativity?
The lesbian or queer women identity group is often mislabeled as this in documents.
what are “widows” or “single women?”
This law required literacy tests and a head tax for people crossing the border in 1917.
What is the Immigration Act of 1917?
Besides archives, Pérez suggests using these cultural forms as sources.
What are corridos, literature, and performance?
This approach studies race, gender, sexuality, and nation as inseparable in borderlands history.
What is an intersectional approach?
This concept explains how national histories are shaped by what is allowed to be named and remembered.
What is the colonial imaginary?
Pérez argues that invisibility is caused not by absence, but by this.
What is biased interpretation shaped by colonial and heteronormative frameworks?
Pérez argues that borders control not just movement, but also this.
What are sexuality, morality, and citizenship?
This is the main problem with relying only on traditional archives.
What is that they were created by colonial, male, and heterosexual institutions?
Her article expands Chicana/o Studies by centering this marginalized group in borderlands history.
Who are queer Chicanas/os (or queers of color in the borderlands)?