About

Letty Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She researches and writes about Shakespeare, critical race theory, pedagogy, cultural practice and production, performance theory, Latinx and Chicanx film and teatro. Letty is an arts advocate, dramaturge, and community-oriented educator. Before joining the Department of Theater and Dance at UC Santa Barbara, she was the President's Postdoctoral Fellow in English at UCSB. Her recent theatrical and academic work has been supported and featured by the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Los Angeles Shakespeare Center, Boston Latino International Film Festival, The Society for Renaissance Study, and the San Diego Shakespeare Society. Her forthcoming work will be featured by the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Shakespeare, and Digital Theatre+. In addition to her research and writing, Letty is working on a project dedicated to supporting DREAM scholars and undocumented students and educators in higher education. She grew up en la frontera in the Imperial Valley and is a proud first-generation Mexicana in higher education.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Social psychology
• Gender studies
• Demography
• Psychology

Selected publications

• “I Have Tasted Freedom”: An Intersectional Analysis of College-Going Latinas’ Desire for and Meanings of Mobility

  Gender & Society · 2023 · 4 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  Research examining socioeconomic and spatial mobility has shown that gender and sexuality inform approaches to both types of mobility. For Latinas, various axes of power limit, facilitate, and impact their access to sexual and socioeconomic desire, including that related to mobility. We build on these insights to consider the following: (1) How do gender and sexuality inform the meanings that socioeconomically marginalized Latinas assign to mobility in relation to their desire to go to college? And (2) how do they experience mobility while in college, particularly as it pertains to their gender and sexual subjectivities? To answer these questions, we examine interviews with thirty-one Latinas, combined from two separate research projects. Our analysis uses Michelle Fine and Sara I. McClelland’s concept of “thick desire” to facilitate an intersectional analysis of the meanings that college-going Latinas assign to mobility. We contend that while economically marginalized Latinas view going away to college as a strategy for socioeconomic mobility, their pursuit of this is also interwoven with their desire for gender and sexual freedom. We also find that college shaped their articulation of what mobility means in relation to the gender and sexual lives they desire for themselves.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michelle Gomez Parra

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  1 shared

• R. González Montero

  1 shared

• Francesca Degiuli

  1 shared

• Judith L. Talcott

  1 shared

• John Foran

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1 shared

• T. Durá Travé

  1 shared

• Peter Chua

  1 shared

• Jessica Fields

  University of California, San Francisco

  1 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara

• Craig Hawkerh-169
• Richard Mayerh-147
• Guillermo C. Bazanh-141
• Steven P. DenBaarsh-124
• Kenneth S. Kosikh-120