Gabriela Valenzuela

Gabriela Valenzuela is a literary historian who examines U.S. Central American and Latina/o/x/e literature from the nineteenth century to the present with a focus on transnationalism, genre and print culture, racial capitalism, and gender. In her current book project, “Reading Centroamericanismo: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Central American Literature, 1870-1921,” (working title) Valenzuela employs interdisciplinary methods, including close reading, archival research, and queer theory, to engage the diverse, fugitive forms that constitute U.S. Central American literature, arguing that these texts generate a much clearer and radically different vision of Central American diasporas in the U.S. Her most recent publications, “Centro America in San Francisco” and “José Rodríguez Cerna’s Crónicas Californianas,” are forthcoming in Latinx Literary Modernities, 1898-1992 and Pasados: Recovering Histories, Imagining Latinidad. 

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