“Invenatadas/Inventada: Addressing the Coloniality of Transgender Through Jotería Selves”

While recent scholarship addresses how transness and brownness coexist within larger queer, trans, and Latinx historical experiences (Galarte 2021), we have yet to grapple with how gender-diverse Indigenous people across Abya Yala design and curate trans selves in their encounters with dominant and Western trans knowledge of being/ existing. In this talk, Omi Salas-SantaCruz will engage decolonial and queer ethnic Indigenous studies to analyze how a group of "jotas inventadas", or made-up gender-diverse queers, craft and explain their existence by traveling across Indigenous epistemic frameworks of thinking the "así"  (Kusch 2010; DiPietro 2019), Jotería (Hames-García 2013), and Anglo Western trans knowledge (Currah and Stryker 2014) to design, or "invent" new notions of Jota selves that more accurately represents their practices of being/existing as gender-diverse people. Through interviews, social media, and Western digital storytelling, Omi will provide insight into the extent to which these communities of "jotas inventadas/inventada" challenge dominant scripts of racial and gender identity and craft new vocabularies and political sensibilities against the backdrop of epistemic trans violence.