Locas in the Heartland: Queer and Trans Cuban Refugees and the Recalibration of the U.S. Straight State
Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026 | 5:00 - 6:30 p.m. | 513 Fayerweather
No registration required. Only open to campus affiliates.
René Esparza, Washington University
During the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, gay rights organizations estimated that up to 25,000 queer and trans Cubans arrived in the United States, making Mariel arguably the largest migration of sexual and gender minorities in modern U.S. history. This talk follows their journeys from refugee camps in the upper Midwest to LGBTQ sponsorship networks across the country, showing how Cold War humanitarianism collided with immigration laws that continued to classify homosexuals as excludable. Rather than marking the end of sexual exclusion, Mariel reshaped the terms of U.S. sexual citizenship by privileging cisnormative legibility as a condition of refugee incorporation and consigning gender-nonconforming refugees to detention, institutionalization, and prolonged legal limbo.
René Esparza is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS and is currently completing Exiled and Excludable: Queer and Trans Cuban Refugees and the Making of U.S. Sexual Citizenship.
Sponsored by the Columbia Research Initiative on the Global History of Sexualities and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender
Co-sponsorsed by the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
