top of page
WELCOME!
Thank you for taking
an interest in me
and my work.
I invite you to roam
around my website and
learn more about me,
my books and other publications.
You can also get some
insight into projects
and interests that keep
me busy in
Tucson, Arizona.
Click HERE to learn more
about my books
Re-Activating Tucson's Downtown History
The University of Arizona's Confluencenter hosted a
"Show & Tell" discussion that focused on efforts to re-activate Mexican/Mexican American history on January 27, 2023 at the Sosa-Carrillo House (which is now the Mexican American Heritage & History Museum). I, Betty Villegas, and Mayor Regina Romero were the featured speakers. Watch it HERE. You can find my presentation at the 1:00 mark. It was one of coldest evenings in Tucson but the Confluencenter staged a warm and informative event.
Together On the Air: LIVE on Radio
On December 10, 2022, I participated in a "live" radio event at the ONE Archives Foundation in Los Angeles. This celebration launched their current online exhibit, "Together On the Air."
It chronicles the history of Radio GLLU, the first bilingual LGBTQ+ radio program in the U.S. From the mid-1980s through the 1990s, Radio GLLU was hosted and run by the Los Angeles-based Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), one of the first LGBTQ+ Latinx organizations in the country. Listen to the "live" launch event that I participated in HERE.
To access the ONE Archives'
"The Together On The Air Online Exhibition" CLICK HERE.
U.S. Transportation Secretary
Pete Buttigieg
holding a copy of
In the Shadows of the Freeway:
Growing Up Brown & Queer
During his visit to Tucson on August 11, 2022, Mayor Regina Romero (also in the photo) gifted Buttigieg my book that describes the steady expansion of Interstate 10 and how it separated and isolated a barrio of brown and poor residents from the rest of the city.
To read a related news item of Buttigieg's visit
and learn more about my insights regarding
infrastructural agendas CLICK HERE
Want to know more about the book?
More about In the Shadows of the Freeway HERE
NEWEST BOOK
In the Shadows of The Freeway:
Growing Up Brown & Queer
Released Nov. 23, 2019
"A searing memoir of legacy, loss, and love. Infusing historical research with childhood memories, Lydia Otero poignantly reveals the weight of urban development on Mexican communities in postwar Tucson. With rare insight, In the Shadow of the Freeway is a singular contribution to Latina/o history, urban studies, queer theory, and gender studies."
Vicki L Ruiz
University of California, Irvine
Photo of Lydia Otero carrying GLLU
banner at 1987 L.A. PRIDE
A documentary film featuring eight members of GAY & LESBIAN LATINOS UNIDOS (GLLU) in Los Angeles, California, one of the first Queer Latinx organizations in the country premiered on June 3, 2022. I was one of the members interviewed.
Learn more about the documentary
"Unidad: Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos"
HERE
See a short teaser/clip HERE
The April 2022 edition of
High Country News
includes my essay in their special "ARCHIVE" edition.
"My archive: 20 years of
Los Angeles’
LGBTQ+ movement
Released March23, 2022
"In the 20 years I lived in Los Angeles, I acquired 10 different addresses. This doesn’t account for the weeks when I found myself in between apartments, sleeping on friends’ floors or couches. Every time I moved, I protected the contents of a box filled with squirreled-away photographs and memorabilia, souvenirs of events I had attended and brown queer activists I worked alongside. In my gut, I knew that the datebooks, newsletters, documents and photographs in that box were important. They mattered to history and served as a reminder of the forces that shaped my life as a queer of color. Few of the people I remember ever made it into history books; some young men who died of AIDS never even made it into an obituary, or onto an AIDS quilt."
READ MY HCN ESSAY HERE.
Interviews and News Items
Interested in more news items, interviews and publications that have quoted or featured Lydia Otero?
Find more here.
NOTITAS:
SELECT COLUMNS FROM THE TUCSON CITIZEN
by
Alva B. Torres
Compiled by Lydia R. Otero
Released September 23, 2021
Alva B. Torres continues to
inspire me to this day.
It was her role in historic
preservation that drew my
attention as I began
the research that
culminated in the
publication of my book,
La Calle: Spatial Conflicts
and Urban Renewal in a
Southwest City in 2010.
Before writing her weekly columns
— on which Notitas is based —
Torres had organized the
Society for the Preservation of
Tucson’s Plaza de la Mesilla
or La Placita Committee,
the most formidable
resistance effort to
urban renewal that
targeted Tucson’s oldest
barrios in the late 1960s.
This photo of us was taken in
2016 at an awards ceremony.
The Pima County Public
Library's LGBTQ+
Services Committee
and Nuestras Raíces presented
"A Conversation with
Lydia R. Otero"
on Saturday,
October 16, 2021.
To learn more about the
Pima County Library
and the teams
who made this
conversation possible,
click HERE.
NPR featured the
Notitas:
Select Columns From
The Tucson Citizen
Book Release Party
held on
September 25, 2021
on Arizona Spotlight.
It is the first story
but the entire
program is pretty interesting.
Click HERE to listen.
2021
Tucson Festival of Books
"Arizona authors Alberto Álvaro Ríos and Lydia R. Otero will discuss their newest books, both of which explore the power of place and community along the border. How much is lost when families are dislocated altogether? Living where we do, these are things for all of us to think about."
Interested? Watch the session HERE.
Barrio Stories
Lydia Otero's book La Calle inspired an outdoor, site-specific theatrical event, Barrio Stories, produced by Borderlands Theater in 2016 in Tucson’s downtown area. More than 5,000 people attended the play, which was designed to recover the history of a barrio declared expendable by city leaders who purposely devised an urban renewal program to demolish it in the late 1960s. Impressive and grand, the event ran for four days in a space larger than two football fields. It featured forty-one principal actors, required more than a hundred volunteers, and involved about thirty production specialists in set design, sound, media, and choreography. Click here to lean more about the production.
bottom of page