Description:
Through photographs, archival documents, and storytelling, L.A. Interchanges: A Brown & Queer Archival Memoir weaves a gripping narrative of personal becoming amid the political and cultural currents of 1980s Los Angeles.
Review Quotes:
L.A. Interchanges shows that archival storytelling can be an act of everyday resistance. It counters the institutional forgetting of marginalized people's history. With moving prose, stories, and ephemera, Lydia Otero's memoir bears witness to the power of queer, trans, and nonbinary people of color. They write to remind us that to historicize oneself is to stake a claim to humanity, to reveal possibilities of better futures, and to inspire a consciousness for multigenerational movement work.
-Umi Hsu, PhD, Director of Content Strategy, ONE Archives Foundation
"a refreshing counterpoint to white male biases in LGBTQ history as well as histories of Los Angeles"
-Pacific Historical Review
Author Lydia Otero takes a special interest in the effect that urban environments have on the people who inhabit them...[L.A. Interchanges] tells a coming-of-age story amid the electrical guts of various Los Angeles building projects and the lesbian activist scene of the early 1980s, written not just from Otero's memories but also from their personal archive. "During my time in Los Angeles," they write, "I squirreled away documents, as well as photographs of the Brown queer activists I worked alongside."
-Los Angeles Review of Books
Lydia Otero's riveting memoir is grounded in personal and collective history that has been erased from works on Los Angeles. Otero reveals the struggles of queer folks of color and the spaces that they created in the 1980s. L.A. Interchanges is essential reading for those wanting a more complete and nuanced understanding of the multilayered history of Los Angeles.
-Enrique C. Ochoa, California State University, Los Angeles
Lydia Otero's L.A. Interchanges is a remarkable memoir featuring a journey through a disappeared Los Angeles. Many of the places and people Otero mentions in this retelling of their young, vibrant life are gone and lost. It takes a memoirist of their caliber to successfully weave their personal story while simultaneously featuring some of the enormous changes in the cityscape over the last few decades. The worlds Otero straddles as a young Tucsonan transplant, a unionized electrician, a Latinx LGBTQ activist, and an academic offer a view of a life that rarely gets featured in literary storytelling. Otero's voice allows us to be there with them on 70s dancefloors, at lesbian activist gatherings, inside hospital AIDS wards, and inside massive L.A. infrastructure projects, not to mention a couple of unique celebrity encounters. L.A. Interchanges is a great and important read.
- Richard Villegas Jr., author of I Heart Babylon, La Música Romántica, and the substack "The Alphabet People: The LGBTQs of Teaching Kindergarten"
Readers of L.A. Interchanges are given a roadmap of how one can live a life that makes a difference. This is a memoir that epitomizes "the personal is political," and its pages are filled with documents and details on an important history.
-Steven Reigns, author of A Quilt for David