Nepantla Squared

A 2021 Lambda Literary Awards finalist, this study follows two transgender mestiz@ lives, one at the start of the twentieth century and one at the start of the twenty-first. Linda Heidenreich uses these two periods to show how race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and capital worked differently in each. Because transgender mestiz@ experiences have largely been left out of historical records, the author applies an intersectional approach that questions monopoly power and global capitalism. The work draws on Gloria Anzaldúa's idea of the nepantlera, a person able to live between and embody several cultures, and extends it into the term nepantla², which names moments of capitalist change when gender was also shifting. Transgender mestiz@s moved through that same change. Heidenreich closely examines the many in-between spaces where people built lives across cultures and genders during periods of shifting empire and capital. The result is a discussion of race, class, nation, and citizenship centered on transgender people of color, asking readers to reconsider the gendered social and economic problems of the present.