L.A. Interchanges : A Brown & Queer Archival Memoir

By Lydia R Otero

Selected among Gustavo Arellano's Top Four California Memoirs of 2023!
-Los Angeles Times

L.A. Taco’s 2023 Best Books

"Interchanges suggests more than mere roads and connections; it evokes a transformative odyssey, a journey where individuals reach pivotal junctures demanding difficult decisions."
-Lydia Otero in the Los Angeles Review of Books By combining the intimacy of a personal memoir with the rigor of documentary history, Lydia Otero weaves together a rich narrative of identity, activism, and personal transformation. With meticulous attention to detail, Otero traverses the homes of family members to dancefloors, bustling work sites, and organizing spaces in search of brown and queer belonging. Through photographs, archival documents, and compelling storytelling, Otero crafts a passionate narrative of personal becoming amid the political and cultural currents of 1980s Los Angeles.

Grounded in the philosophy that the personal is political, Otero portrays fellow organizers as strategists exploring previously unimagined avenues to address the needs of brown queers. The book traces Otero’s transformations and blossoming sense of self, which often felt constrained by the binary gender assignments of the time, while it tells a documentary history of Lesbians of Color, Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), Lesbianas Unidas (LU) and Bienestar