José A. de la Garza Valenzuela is Assistant Professor in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Focusing on fiction by gay Chicano writers, his current research investigates the legal underpinnings of queer migrant narrative to shed light on experiences of migration and residence in the U.S. inaccessible through the state’s legal archive. More broadly, his interdisciplinary research and teaching focuses on Latinx literature, relational migration, and histories of legality with careful attention to questions of ethnicity, race, sexuality, and citizenship. Dr. de la Garza Valenzuela’s work has appeared in Latino Studies, is forthcoming in MELUS, and has been recognized by the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies. He is currently at work on a monograph tentatively titled Queer in a Legal Sense: Brown Citizenship and Other Lawful Fictions.

Dr. de la Garza Valenzuela received his PhD in English with a concentration in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, after receiving degrees in English, Economics, and International Business from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. After completing his doctoral training, he was a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then Assistant Professor of Latinx Literatures at Florida Atlantic University. He has designed and taught graduate and undergraduate courses on Latinx literature, comparative Latinx migrations, queer U.S. writers of color, citizenship and narrative, and U.S. social movements in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

Born in Durango, Mexico, Dr. de la Garza Valenzuela’s work as a researcher, teacher, and mentor is informed by his own experiences as a migrant. Growing up undocumented in Houston, his early interest in the relationship between fiction and the law grew out of reading and translating immigration documents for his family and later undergoing the naturalization process himself. He is a first-generation college graduate.