2026-09-23T02:47:13Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/124647 2026-01-14 col_2142_5131 col_2142_14851 com_2142_5130 com_2142_14849 com_2142_8903

Moussawi, Ghassan Moussawi, Ghassan Mendenhall, Ruby Miles, Brittney S Vergara Bracamontes, Damian Flynn, Karen 2024-05 application/pdf en text Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2026-05-01 The student, Jessennya Hernandez, accepted the attached license on 2024-04-05 at 15:09. The student, Jessennya Hernandez, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2024-04-05 at 15:24. This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2024-04-12 at 09:26. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #20309 on 2024-09-16 at 00:49:10 Queering urban autonomy in greater Los Angeles: Latinx poli-creative survival strategies Hernandez, Jessennya 2024-04-12 Urban Studies Latinx Queer Worldmaking Embodied Knowledge This dissertation is an ethnographic study that examines how working class queer and femme Latinx artists from immigrant communities -whom I refer to as poli-creatives- use their creative labor to navigate their sociopolitical economic conditions across greater Los Angeles (LA). I contextualize LA as a transnational site with historical and ongoing structures of imperialism and settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, environmental racism, gentrification, and state violence that these poli-creatives and their communities must navigate. Based on participant observation and life history and informal interviews conducted in 2019 and 2020, I intervene in urban studies, gender and sexuality, and social movements scholarship by arguing for a rethinking of queer communities and resistance. While urban studies scholarship has employed the language of citizenship and focused on LGBT neighborhood-based models of queer resilience, I divert our attention to thinking about liberatory urban autonomies that are rooted in reciprocal care and survival. To do so, I introduce the concept of mycorrhizal assemblages that serves as a theoretical and analytical tool. Drawing on subterranean webs of mycelial fungal strands, mycorrhizal assemblages conceptualize how poli-creatives build a multifaceted ecosystem of informal creative economies and subaltern and decolonial knowledges rooted in a praxis of communal care: sharing resources, skills, political goals, and affective trauma to help each other and their local working-class Black and brown immigrant communities build sustainability and self-determination. Rather than depend on visibility and representations in public space, gayborhoods, or the neoliberal settler-colonial state and formal institutions for survival, I show how these assemblages invest in ancestral practices and healing, experiences of migration, intimate and accessible spaces, and bodily autonomy. I argue that these multiple, nonlinear, and regenerative ways of living and knowing lay down new soil for collective survival and build liberatory imaginations for queer worldmakings and a future otherwise. Text eng https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124647 Copyright 2024 Jessennya Hernandez Ph.D. Dissertation Sociology University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Sociology