WELCOME!

Thank you for taking

an interest in me

and my work.

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I invite you to roam

around my website and

learn more about me, 

my books and other publications.

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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

Photo of Lydia Otero carrying GLLU

banner at 1987 L.A. PRIDE

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A documentary film featuring 9 members of GAY & LESBIAN LATINOS UNIDOS (GLLU) in Los Angeles, California, one of the first Queer Latinx organizations in the country is in the works. I am one of the members interviewed.

Learn more about the documentary HERE

Coming Summer 2022! 

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

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Released March23, 2022

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"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." 

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READ MY HCN ESSAY HERE.

The Pima County Public

Library's LGBTQ+

Services Committee

and Nuestras Raíces  presented

"A Conversation with

Lydia R. Otero"

on Saturday,

October 16, 2021.

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To learn more about the

Pima County Library

and the teams

who made this

conversation possible,

click HERE.

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NEWEST BOOK

In the Shadows of The Freeway:

Growing Up Brown & Queer

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Released Nov. 23, 2019

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"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."

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Vicki L Ruiz 

University of California, Irvine

NOTITAS:

SELECT COLUMNS FROM THE TUCSON CITIZEN

by

Alva B. Torres

Compiled by Lydia R. Otero

Released September 23, 2021

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Alva B. Torres continues to

inspire me to this day.

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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.

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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.

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This photo of us was taken in

2016 at an awards ceremony.

NPR featured the

Notitas:

Select Columns From

The Tucson Citizen 

Book Release Party

held on

September 25, 2021

on Arizona Spotlight.

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It is the first story

but the entire

program is pretty interesting.

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Click HERE to listen.

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.