Stanford Humanities Center
Mario A. Gómez Zamora is a scholar of queerness, gender and sexuality, migration, memory, Latinx and Latin American studies, dance studies, Indigenous performances, and P’urhépecha studies. His research and teaching focus on migration and queer Indigenous resistances, queer Indigenous customary practices and danzas, and queer Indigenous research methodologies. For over a decade, Mario has collaborated with P’urhépecha youth and elders in the recollection of oral histories in Tangancícuaro county in Michoacán, México where he was born and raised. His research and poetry have been published in multiple collections in P’urhépecha, Spanish, and English, including the Genealogy journal, Wicaso Sa Review, Pasados: Recovering Histories, Imagining Latinidad, Los Angeles Review of Books, and edited volumes by the Universidad Michoacana and the Centro Latinoamericano de Economía Humana Uruguay. Mario is editor of the oral history book Entre el Recuerdo y la Memoria: Historias de Patamban.
SHC Project
Queer P’urhépecha Histories and Performances Beyond Borders
Mario A. Gómez Zamora’s first book project explores the cultural tensions that queer Indigenous P’urhépechas face when participating in their communities’ traditions. Through the lens of queer theory and performance studies, Mario analyzes how Indigenous communities reproduce colonial violence against queer individuals in the present, and how queer P’urhépechas work toward new futures through danzas and performances in P’urhépecha fiestas and ceremonies while they claim their indigeneity as part of the collective in Michoacán and among those P’urhépechas who migrated to the Pacific Coast and Midwest of the United States. To trace the stories of marginalized Indigenous people in both their homelands and in sites of migration, Mario combines Indigenous methodologies, such as talking-while-walking through the landscape, with oral histories, semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and archival research. His scholarship reshapes queer studies, migration studies, and performance studies by examining how queer P’urhépechas are embraced by the collective via their participation in danzas as female characters but are still subjects of anti-gay violence and death beyond the performance space. This is a project of hope, life, and resistance to the hegemonic normativity in the P’urhépecha landscape.
Last publications:
“Those Who Are Like That: Performing Queer Belonging Through P’urhépecha Indigenous Practices of El Costumbre”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971964
“AN INDIGENOUS P’URHÉPECHA WOMAN’S RECORD: Recordando el Pasado de Mamá Lupe”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/48831184?seq=1
“Breaking Queer Silences, Building Queer Archives, and Claiming Queer Indigenous P’urhépecha Methodologies”
https://www.mdpi.com/2313-5778/8/4/123
Last public talk:
