The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory (NYU Press, Sexual Cultures Series, 2007)

PRESS REVIEWS:
"Lima’s book exemplifies the interdisciplinary, comparative promise of a discernable Latino studies project…. refreshingly defies canonical confinement or temporal restriction. The Latino Body usefully serves as a map for those striving to stake scholarly claims in the name of Latino studies. [He] offers pointed and measured readings that extend beyond clever interpretation to manifest politically rooted and socially relevant commentary." —R. T. Rodríguez, Latino Studies

"In this provocative study, Lázaro Lima links the difficulties the Latino subject faces in the mainstream American imaginary to the “literal and metaphorical divide between Mexico” and the U.S. [...] Lima's examination concerns the limits and parameters of citizenship. Reading a wide range of texts, he provides a sophisticated and important critique of the limits of US citizenship for Latinos. This text, a worthy contribution to American Studies, inspires more critical analyzes of the crisis of Latino bodies in US literary and cultural discourses."
—Vanessa K. Valdés, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.

"Lima's book makes several crucial contributions. First, it is based on the intersections of various disciplines, such as American, Latin American, and Latino studies with ethnic, queer, gender and cultural studies, allowing for interdisciplinary readings that focus on the multiple dimensions of cultural productions. Second, Lima combines solid historiographical research with literary and cultural analysis, promoting critical interventions that are not seduced by empty impositions of 'high' or 'abstract' theory on literature as a primary, untheorized discourse; on the contrary, Lima takes into consideration each text's very specific context of production [...] Finally, the book has an excellent balance between new... and paradigmatic texts in the canon of Chicano/Latino studies."
—Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies

"Memory, and the visceral pun in Lima's term 're-membering,' tie the various threads in The Latino Body together even as Lima seeks to unravel other threads, other memories. Those interested in deepening their own understanding of Latino literature and culture… may find The Latino Body as practical as it is challenging and intriguing.
—Mark Noe, Journal of Latinos and Education

"Lima mueve su análisis ágilmente entre discursos literarios y genealogías políticas e históricas diversas, demonstrando ser un apto interlocutor tanto de la producción cultural mexico-americana del siglo diecinueve como de la obra reciente de autores de las diásporas caribeñas." —Carlos Decena, Revista Iberoamericana

“An engaging, original, readable work. . . . Highly recommended.” --CHOICE

EDITORIAL REVIEWS:
"Through a bricolage of carefully crafted textual readings, Lima has produced a text that traces the relationship between corporeality and citizenship by marking the process by which the Latino body has become historical. Situated in moments of national and bodily crisis, his archive is decidedly precise and imaginatively expansive, metaphorically rich and politically dynamic. Drawing on texts central to third world feminism, queer studies, and Latin and Latino American literatures, this work is as central to rethinking the American literary canon as it is to an invigorating remapping of Latino Studies." 
 —Juana María Rodríguez, University of California, Berkeley, author of Queer Latinidad 

"Lima's Latino Body promises to productively disrupt the business-as-usual of critical and scholarly practice in the still-emerging field of U.S. Latino studies; it will contribute directly to the next stage in the long process of what it itself terms Latino identity's 'becoming historical' in North American cultural, political, and intellectual contexts. For this reason alone, The Latino Body could not be more welcome, or more timely."  —Ricardo L. Ortíz, Georgetown University, author of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America

Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011)

Ambientes has been nominated by the American Library Association for a Rainbow Book Award

PRESS REVIEWS: 
"Lazaro Lima, an author and university professor, and well-known, prolific writer Felice Picano have teamed up together to present ... an impressive collection ... that seeks to 'provide a timely and representative archive of queer literary and cultural memory.' Lima's scholarly introduction is a notably smart and lively assessment of the state of Latino culture, and discusses the true intent and creative nature of Latino writing, which, he notes, can often be considered 'narrative acts against oblivion'... There are no duds in the collection."
—Jim Piechota, Bay Area Reporter

The writers in this new anthology of short stories are doubly disenfranchised: first, by the dominant national discourse, which continues to use racial and ethnic categories when defining what it means to be an American; and second; by a tacit understanding within the Latino community that heterosexual relations are better than homosexual ones. In this vein, the [...] stories included [in Ambientes] challenge these obstacles by celebrating a group of voices that affirm 'We're here, we're Latino and queer, get used to it!'"
—Eduardo Febles, The Gay and Lesbian Review

"In his Introduction to Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing ... Lima defines the [book's] scope as an opening statement in a growing conversation, one that confronts the bias of mainstream American cultural constructs and seeks to 'envison a different kind of national culture' ... Lima and Picano have taken that first step toward transmuting our individual experiences into a larger cultural legacy, and, in turn, opening the door to a broader, more inclusive national identity." —Dan López, Lambda Literary Review

Lambda Literary Review's most "Highly Anticipated titles of 2011": "Can you believe it’s been over a decade since Jaime Manrique and Jesse Dorris’ anthology, Bésame Mucho was last published, and almost as long since Tortilleras came out? Finally, a new anthology of LGBT Latino literary expression that collects some of our favorite writers including Lambda Literary Award winner Achy Obejas, finalists Rigoberto González, Myriam Gurba, and Emanuel Xavier, in addition to Charles Rice-González and Steven Cordova." —Lambda Literary Review

EDITORIAL REVIEWS:
"With this collection, queer Latina/o writers claim their place in the variegated terrain of contemporary American fiction. Ranging from the erotic to the elegiac, the fantastic to the frighteningly real, these stories entertain our senses and challenge our notions of what it means to be a queer person of color." — Israel Reyes, Dartmouth College, author of Humor and the Eccentric Text in Puerto Rican Literature

In my research and scholarship I explore how the intersections of nationalism, race, language, gender, and sexuality have given rise to majority conceptions of "minority" subjectivity in the United States as well as how subaltern affronts against entrenched notions of "American" cultural identity have transformed the nation. My first book, The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory (New York University Press, 2007), examined key "crisis moments" in United States cultural history that have shaped and given rise to what today we would consider "Latina" and "Latino" forms of personhood. The book analyzed how print culture after the end of the U.S-Mexico War of 1848 reconfigured race relations in the United States by organizing national belonging around an axis of race as opposed to the category of citizenship in jurisprudence. It is for this reason, for example, that the national signifier "Mexican" became a racial designation in the United States rather than one of national affiliation after the incorporation of almost half of Mexico’s territories.

These concerns related to American cultural history, sexuality, race, and ethnic identity are extended in my second book Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) which I co-edited with Violet Quill co-founder Felice Picano. Ambientes is one of the first annotated collections of pan-Latino LGBTQ writing by both established and emerging voices. The collection contains a framing essay I wrote on the literary and cultural historiography of Latino LGBTQ writing in the United States as well as a co-authored essay on the importance of taking Spanish seriously as a language of national becoming. The collection compiles post-Stonewall queer Latino narratives in order to reconfigure the operative models of "gay and lesbian" cultural studies that have dominated the field. Ambientes sets the parameters for understanding how queer Latino cultural production has been delimited by monolingual and monological investments that often fail to register how Latino "counter-publics" fashion civic belonging outside the sanctioned imperatives of the "coming out narrative" that has functioned as the sine qua non of queer political critique.

My forthcoming book, Sonia Sotomayor: An American Life After Multiculturalism (University of Houston/Arte Público Press, 2011) is a critical scholarly biography of the first Latina Supreme Court Justice. The chronological narrative of her life story begins with her parents' migration from Puerto Rico to the United States during the early 1940s by juxtaposing Puerto Rican social, historical, and cultural happenings alongside U.S. cultural history, including the rise and subsequent dismantling of "Affirmative Action" during Ronald Reagan's presidency. The book ultimately analyzes how Sotomayor is admired in a way that is intelligible in contemporary American culture by making her represent the elusive fulfillment of an exhausted "American dream." In the process, Sonia Sotomayor becomes a figure through whom the character and promise of American political life can be articulated anew by substituting the political dirty work of inclusion required by Latino subjects with the simulacrum of inclusion offered through the American life story of social mobility and assimilation.

My scholarly work has also appeared in academic journals, edited volumes, reviews, popular press pieces, and internet journalism. Some representative articles, in both thematic content and methodological scope, include "Empire's Remains: Cuba, Cuban America, and 'the American 1898' " American Literary History (Vol. 23.2, Summer, 2011: 125-136) "Deseos de estados 'queer' en la producción crítica latina de los Estados Unidos," Revista Iberoamericana (Vol. LXXIV, Number 225, October-December, 2008: 959-971), and "Latino Louisiana," in Latino America, Mark Overmeyer-Velazquez, ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press: 2008: 347-361), "Locas al rescate: The Transnational Hauntings of Queer Cubanidad," in Cuba Transnational, Damián Fernández, ed. (University Press of Florida, 2005: 79-103 [recently reprised in the Journal of Transnational American Studies]), "Spanish Speakers and Early 'Latino' Expression," in American History through Literature: 1829-1870, Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert D. Sattelmeyer, eds. (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 2005: 1118-1123), and "Haunting the Corpus Delicti: Rafael Campo's What the Body Told and Wallace Stevens' Modernist Body," The Wallace Stevens Journal (Vol. 25, No. 2, Fall 2001: 220-231), which was chosen as a companion article for Rafael Campos' poetry in Twentieth Century American Poetry (McGraw Hill, 2003), as well as other publications.

I am currently writing a book on Puerto Rican nationalism and its relation to United States empire building in the Caribbean and the emergence of neoliberal control over culturally "sovereign" states. Research for this latest book project, tentatively titled Empire's Remains: Puerto Rico, Colonial Nationalism, and Counterhegemony, has been supported by a Fellowship and Grant from the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum and forms the basis of my documentary film Imperial Science: "Testimonios" from the Puerto Rican Contraceptive Pill Trials.