Gabriela Valenzuela

Gabriela Valenzuela is a literary historian whose work examines US Central American and Latinx literature, focusing on the nineteenth century, transnationalism, print culture, gender, and sexuality. In her current book project, “Fragments of Femininity: Reading US Central American Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century” (working title), Valenzuela draws on interdisciplinary methods—including close reading, archival research, and queer of color critique—to argue that a nineteenth-century US Central American literature exists, though not in forms we recognize as literary. Its chapters examine distinct, fugitive genres that circulated in newspapers, establishing their literariness along the fine line between fiction and nonfiction and, together, trace an arc from hypervisibility to absence. Because men largely edited and circulated these genres, the book reads with and against that framing to center the women on whom this literary history is predicated. To be part of Central American diasporas in the United States today means living in the aftermath of nationalisms that rendered Central American women visible as symbols but illegible as subjects, relegating their lives to genres that, until now, have been excluded from literariness. “Fragments of Femininity” argues that US Central Americans deserve a literary history that reaches further back in time and extends across genres. Her work appears in or is forthcoming in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists, Latinx Literature in Transition, 1848-1992, and Pasados: Recovering History, Imagining Latinidad.

• Ph.D. English, University of California, Los Angeles, 2022