U N I V E R S I T Y O F T E X A S P R E S S | S P R I N G 2 0 2 4 43 FRANK GARCÍA ridgefield, new jersey García is an assistant professor of English and an affiliate of the de- partment of Africana studies and the program in American studies at Rutgers University, Newark. latinx: the future is now, Lorgia García-Peña & Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, Editors release date | august 6 x 9 inches, 256 pages, 7 b/w photos ISBN 978-1-4773-2943-6 $34.95* | £29.99 | C$43.95 paperback ISBN 978-1-4773-2942-9 $105.00* | £94.00 | C$131.00 hardcover ISBN 978-1-4773-2945-0 $34.95 e-book Clicas examines Latina/o/x literature and film by and/or about gay and women gang members. Through close readings of literature and film, Frank García reimagines the typical narratives describing gang membership and culture, amplifying and complicating critical gang studies in the social sciences and humanities and looking at gangs across racial, eth- nic, and national identities. Analyzing how the autobiographical poetry of Ana Castillo presents gang fashion, culture, and vi- olence to the outside world, the effects of women performing female masculinity in the novel Locas, and gay gang members’ experiences of community in the documentary Homeboy, García complicates the dialogue regarding hypermasculine gang cul- tures. He shows how they are accessible not only to straight men but also to women and gay men who can appropriate them in complicated ways, which can be harming and also, at times, emancipating. Reading gang members as (de)colonial agents who contest the power relations, inequalities, oppressions, and hierarchies of the United States, Clicas considers how women and gay gang members resist materially and psychologically within a milieu shaped by the intersection of race, gender, sex- uality, and class. Clicas Gender, Sexuality, and Struggle in Latina/o/x Gang Literature and Film F R A N K G A R C Í A How Latina/o/x gang literature and film represent women and gay gang members’ challenges to gendered, sexual, racial, and class oppression | l a t i n x & c h i c a n x s t u d i e s | Gender & Sexuality
