L.A. INTERCHANGES
A Brown & Queer Memoir
_______________________
by Lydia R. Otero
Building community
and a city in the 1980s.
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ABOUT
Part working-class memoir and part documentary history, L.A. Interchanges follows Lydia Otero as they move from the homes of family members, dancefloors, work sites, and Los Angeles’s organizing spaces in search of brown and queer belonging. Through photographs, archival documents, and compelling storytelling, Otero weaves a gripping, passionate narrative of personal becoming amid the political and cultural currents of 1980s Los Angeles.
Grounded in the philosophy that the personal is political, Otero portrays fellow organizers as strategists exploring previously unimagined avenues to address the needs of brown queers. The book traces Otero’s transformations and blossoming sense of self, which often felt constrained by the binary gender assignments of the time, while it tells a documentary history of Lesbians of Color, Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), Lesbianas Unidas (LU) and Bienestar: A Gay Latino AIDS Project—groups central to the city’s burgeoning queer, brown, and activist scene. Otero’s parallel story of becoming an electrician offers a unique vantage point of a city in the midst of restructuring, as Otero’s labor contributed to building some of the most iconic structures in Los Angeles, such as the U.S. Bank Tower, Universal Studios’ CityWalk, and the Metro Rail.