Shadows of The Freeway: Growing Brown and Queer with Lydia Otero Reading and Plática

Raised in an adobe house built by their mother, the author takes readers to a mid-20th century barrio that existed on the social margins of Tucson, Arizona despite sitting a little more than a mile away from the central business district. Born in 1955, and nicknamed La Butch by their family, Lydia Otero knew they were queer the moment their consciousness had evolved enough to formulate thoughts.

This book, which combines personal memoir and family history with historical archives, offers more self-disclosure than Otero’s previous works, as the author\’s experiences of childhood take center stage. Otero reveals the day-to-day survival mechanisms they depended upon, the exhilaration of first love, the love of reading and the support the author received from key family members as they tried to gain a sense of belonging in a world mired in dislocation.

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