*Tortillera* is the word—Mexican slang for lesbian, claimed back as identity instead of slur. The book uses that reclamation as its foundation: grounding queer theory in the actual lives of actual people, not abstractions.
Russo Garrido spent a decade in Mexico City’s LGBT spaces. Forty-five in-depth interviews with women aged twenty-two to sixty-five. The first English-language ethnography that centers women’s sexual and intimate cultures in Mexico—not as a sidebar to male-centered queer studies, but as the primary subject.
Three generations of women. Marriage, polyamory, friendship, sex—not discussed as theoretical categories but tracked as lived arrangements that shift and adjust as the legal landscape changes around them. Same-sex marriage becomes law. Anti-discrimination protections get written into the books. These aren’t just policy changes. They alter how people understand themselves, how they name their relationships, what becomes possible to say aloud.
The book shows how legal recognition reshapes intimacy at the ground level. A woman who couldn’t marry now can. A relationship that was invisible becomes documentable. The infrastructure of the state shifts and people reconfigure around it—not perfectly, not without complications, but they reconfigure.
Russo Garrido’s argument emerges from a decade of listening: new intimate cartographies are being drawn. New maps for how love and desire and community can be organized. These aren’t just happening in Mexico City. They’re reshaping the social architecture of Latin America itself—how entire societies think about partnership, kinship, collective life.
The specificity matters. A decade of fieldwork produces granularity that theory alone can’t touch.
Details
| ISBN: 9781978807525 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Chicana/Latina/Latinx Interest; History; Lesbian Studies |
| Subject(s): Anthropology; Cultural & Social; Gay Studies; Gender Studies; History; Latin America; Lesbian Studies; LGBTQ+ Studies; Mexico; Social Science; Sociology; Women’s Studies |
| Publication Date: 2020-06-12 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Rutgers University Press |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 191 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: Anahi Russo Garrido is a researcher and activist whose work sits at the intersection of queer studies, Latin American sociology, and feminist ethnography. The title’s use of tortilleras — Mexican slang for lesbian — is deliberate, reflecting the book’s commitment to grounding academic inquiry in the language communities actually use. |
| Book_ID: 106039 |