Jorge Sánchez Cruz

Jorge Sánchez Cruz is a native of the Central Valleys of Oaxaca and a scholar of 19th to 21st century Latin American literature, culture, and thought, with an emphasis on Mexico. Their research shows how aesthetic creations by Indigenous, queer, trans*, and undocumented subjects reflect and are grounded in the racial and gendered paradigms shaped by the afterlives of slavery and colonization. Gender and sexuality studies, continental philosophy, Indigenous studies, queer theory, and decolonial thought contour their pedagogy and research inquiries.

Their current manuscript, Aesthetics of Repair: AIDS, Race, and Sexual Politics in the Americas, explores literature and visual culture in 1980s and 1990s Mexico and Chile. This book is embedded in the “reparative turn.” It probes that if often the AIDS pandemic has been seen through loss, death, and disappearance, it too can be reimagined through affirmative worldly inhabitations— like joy, intimacy, and community praxes—enacted by racialized sexual dissidents as enduring strategies in sight of catastrophe.

Their work has appeared and is forthcoming in Social Text, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, La Ventana: Revista de Estudios de Género, Harvard’s Review of Latin America, Mester, among other venues. They are the co-editor of the forthcoming book Teoría Queer/Cuir en México (Editorial Signos).

Sánchez Cruz is also working a second project that investigates the re-actualization of colonialism and coloniality in the Mexican South, specifically in the Coastal Region of Oaxaca. Developments of this project have appeared in Revista: Harvard’s Review of Latin America and as “Apuntes para un giro queer decolonial” in Teoría Queer/Cuir en México.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), UPenn’s Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and Harvard University’s Provostial Fund for the Arts and the Humanities have funded their research and pedagogy.

Before UCSD, Sánchez Cruz held academic appointments at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Northwestern University.

Pronouns: any pronoun series

Languages: Spanish, English, some Portuguese

Books

• The Specter of AIDS, by Néstor Perlonger, Trans. Jorge Sánchez Cruz, Punctum Books (Forthcoming)
• Teoría Queer/Cuir en México, edited with Estela Serret and Fer Vélez Rivera, Iztapalapa, México: Editorial Signos.

Articles & Book Chapters

• 2025 "Intimacy, Relationally, Repair: AIDS, Mexico, and the Case of Agustin Martínez Castro," Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, forthcoming.
• 2025. “Apuntes para un giro queer decolonial: prácticas y movimientos disidentes en el Oaxaca contemporáneo,” in Teoría Queer/Cuir en México, edited by Jorge Sánchez Cruz, Estela Serret, and Fer Vélez Rivera, Iztapalapa, México: Editorial Signos, pp. 251-281.
• 2022 Trans* (Dis)appearance at the Mexican Frontier: Reading Refusal in Teresa Margolles’s Ya basta hijos de puta (2018), TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 540-562.
• 2022 “Debility, Negative Affect, Mobility: Undocu-Queer Aesthetics, and the Right to Thrive,” Social Text 151, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 69-92.
• 2021 “Suspensión de género: travestismo y la cuestión de lo trans en Salón de belleza (1999),” Revista de estudios de género, La ventana, vol. 6, no. 54, pp. 304-325.
• 2018 “Encuentros homoeróticos y homosociales: una lectura de Los detectives salvajes (1998), Mester, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 25-38.

Public Humanities Work

• 2024 “‘Forbidden Colors’, (1988): Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Remnants of Solidarity,” ASAP/Journal, October 2024.
• 2023 “Lo prohibido como espacio solidario,” La Tempestad, Web, December 8, no pagination.
• 2023 “Cuir Mourning and Mobilization in Times of Displacement,” Queer in Latin America: LGBTQ Perspectives Edition, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, vol. 23, no. 1, Fall.
• 2023 “José Esteban Muñoz y lo marrón (2023),” La Tempestad, Web, August 11, no pagination.
• 2023 “Cultivando Comunidad: Food Sovereignty and Indigenous Worldbuilding,” Co-authored with Andrés Triana Solórzano, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, vol. 22, no. 3, Spring/Summer.

• Ph.D., University of California, Riverside, 2018
• M.A., San Francisco State University, 2014
• B.A., Concordia University, Irvine, 2011