Nancy Lorenza and Queer Afro Chicana Digital Afterlives

Anahí Ponce^[1]i

Keywords: Borderlands studies, Queer remembering, Digital embodiment, ephemerality, Feminist media studies

Introduction

Nancy Lorenza Green was an Afro-Chicana elder, teacher, writer, artist, musician, poet, and healer from the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez borderlands. Born to an African American father and Mexican mother, Nancy grew up in Juárez nearly a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Loving vs. Virginia made interracial marriage legal and resided in El Paso in her later years (Gina Núñez-Mchiri, oral history, 2025). I knew of Nancy predominantly through her literary work as the author of several poetry collections, and as a prominent figure in the arts education scene in El Paso. In March 2023, community members and Nancy’s loved ones came together to organize a fundraiser to support her battle with cancer. I took my father with me to the fundraiser that was being held on an outdoor patio of a bar in central El Paso that we both frequented. The event organizers donated the proceeds made that night to Nancy, and they additionally collaborated with local artists who in turn donated their artistic works for a silent auction (see Figure 1). The evening was spent in community, with poetry readings and drum circles accompanied by Nancy playing a wooden flute, as she was an avid practitioner of Indigenous and West African based music practices.

Nancy passed later that summer, and in the months that followed I kept the event and her larger legacy in the back of my mind, as I moved in and out of El Paso. Nearly a year later, as I re-read the groundbreaking 1987 anthology Compañeras: Latina Lesbians (an Anthology) edited by Junaita Ramos/Juanita Diaz-Cotto, I came across a piece titled, “Homophobia: el miedo de una sociedad.” Authored by a contributor named “Lorenza” and written in Spanish, it detailed the prevalence of homophobia in Latine communities and its profound impact on queer Latinas/es. I quickly reviewed the list of contributor biographies in the back of the anthology searching for more information about Lorenza’s identity. Lorenza’s biography reads as follows,

Lorenza: I am Mexican, born in El Paso, Texas and raised in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua until I was nine years old. I’ve been living in the Boston area of Massachusetts for the last 15 years. I came up here to study but instead decided to stay and work in community-based human service programs. I enjoy playing wooden flutes and sketching. I also enjoy participating in discussion groups and organizing productive activities with other sisters. I came out when I was 20 (Ramos, 1987, p. 338).

Things clicked into place: the locations, the name “Lorenza,” and the mention of wooden flute playing all resonated with me as I recalled that Nancy had completed her Masters at Cambridge College and had lived in Massachusetts before later returning to El Paso. Prior to this moment, I did not know Nancy to self-identify as a lesbian or queer. Most of her written and performance works that I was familiar with dealt with concepts of cultural hybridity in the borderlands, gender violence, and larger historical contributions of women in the region, scarcely if ever with any explicit or even subtle references to queerness or sexuality.

This chance realization prompted a range of questions: Is this actually a written piece by a young Nancy Lorenza Green circa 1987? Why didn't I know she was a lesbian? Wait, does she formally mention her relationship to queerness in any of her other works? Is this why she’s going by ‘Lorenza’ here? Through my time in youth organizing circles in El Paso and as a student at the university in El Paso, I had come to form relationships with colleagues of Nancy, so when these questions arose, I knew who I could reach out to for answers.

I situate the events leading up to this article as a meditation in sitting in the frictions of queer of color epistemologies and cultural work rendered ephemeral. In looking at Nancy's embodiments across media as a queer Afro-Chicana from the U.S.-Mexico border, I contend that her work(s) are integral in further examining how racialized and gendered populations work with and against media and technologies, as they have historically with borders. Accordingly, this article examines some of Nancy’s texts and their various afterlives and offers queer fronteriza/e recognition as a practice equipped in reading them. Queer fronteriza/e recognition draws on Legacy Russell’s analysis of Judith Butler's distinction between being recognized and recognizable, as it demands a reckoning with the self that then promptly requires us to see parts of ourselves in others (Russell, 2020, p.28). Read in this way, I pose recognition in direct opposition to western academic dialogues that prioritize the language of "discovery" in framings of epistemic contributions from communities of color and other historically marginalized groups. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s call for research practices invested in collective memory with regard to scholarship about communities who have historically been impacted by settler colonialism, is similarly pertinent here (Smith, 2022). Adding a fronteriza/e perspective to these undertakings is significant in so much that it establishes how women and queer people along borders are predisposed to these approaches in how they subvert systems of domination, across multiple sites, and always in relation to one another.

I invoke queer fronteriza/e recognition in the sections that follow as a framework that can more intimately grapple with queer of color afterlives, digital embodiment, and the intergenerational networks of care that bind these threads together. I begin by looking at Nancy's approach to her queerness in her contribution in Compañeras (1987), followed by an analysis of her embodiment as an Afro-Chicana in the multiplayer virtual world Second Life. I conclude the article with excerpts from an oral history with one of Nancy’s mentees that explicates the potency of intergenerational kinship and care that was foundational to who Nancy was as an artist and community member. In each of these sections, I interweave oral histories with Nancy's loved ones as a practice in ethnographic memory work that undergirds queer fronteriza/e recognition through intergenerational memory keeping.

As such, oral histories and historically situated Chicane/a and Latine/a methodologies such as pláticas are heavily incorporated in this article. Pláticas are informal conversations where interlocutors become co-creators of knowledge via their use of testimony and storytelling (Fierros and Bernal, 2016; Heidenreich, 2020; Rodríguez, 2003). In utilizing pláticas as a method to conduct oral histories, my aim was to foster a non-hierarchal space committed to a more symbiotic and horizontal approach to articulating memories regarding Nancy’s life and legacy. I additionally employ rhetorical analysis to do a close reading of Nancy’s piece in Compañeras (1987), and employ digital and theoretical analysis in examining Nancy’s former avatar on Second Life. In conducting analysis of digital texts, I address qualitative scholars' calls for researchers to become translators of internet cultures rather than critics (Underberg and Zorn, 2013; Bhattacharya, 2017). This work is made additionally imperative by the ephemeral nature of both the Internet and social media, as well as queer and femme of color embodiments online. Taken together, I continue to reflect on Nancy’s legacy in the region and think through how she worked with and against various technologies, struggles, and networks in her practice as a cultural worker.

Encuentros Lesbianas, “Lo que se ve no se pregunta”

“In the generation of Nancy and Juan Gabriel there was a phrase that Juan Gabriel often repeated, ‘Lo que se ve no se pregunta,’ but ella siempre tenía su medalla, cuidaba mucha su energía”

(Gina Núñez-Mchiri, oral history, 2025).

. I begin this section by analyzing the initial moment of encuentro that sparked my recognition of Nancy’s work in Compañeras (1987), alongside a close reading of her piece in the anthology, and an oral history that informs it. Though I was not conducting traditional archival work at the time, I view this instance as a form of memory work and memory keeping in action where my re-reading of Compañeras was transformed from a passive act into a chance realization that allowed me to connect with Nancy’s work and her queerness in ways that were otherwise untraversed. Similar to an archivist's discovery of something once lost or obfuscated in the archive, locating Nancy’s work in Compañeras facilitated an intergenerational memory space (Cotera, 2021, p. 50) that not only allowed me to decipher her as the author of the piece, but created a domino effect that led me to confirm my curiosities with other Chicana/Latina elders and community members from El Paso-Ciudad Juárez. The recuperation of Nancy’s work in this way not only offers another lens through which to read her larger legacy and repertoire, but generates an opening to think about the ephemerality of Latina/e lesbian stories and the communities of people (queer and otherwise) who keep these stories alive beyond death.

Excavating Nancy’s queerness in her literary work similarly facilitates a conceptualizing of queerness here as a moment of possibility, a kind of task that inherently demands recognition not in what is obvious, but rather in sitting with what has been made strategically absent. This absence mirrors scholarship in critical archival studies that has asserted the added burden of unearthing the cultural contributions of members from historically marginalized communities and the methods that require sitting in the silences that archives produce along the lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality (Caswell et al., 2017; Hartman, 2008; Pérez, 2003; Salazar, 2023; Zepeda, 2022). Here, we can interpret Nancy’s use of the pseudonym ‘Lorenza’ in line with what José Esteban Muñoz has written of queer ephemerality as it pertains to archival “evidence,” as he cites the often covert quality of the articulation of queerness as a method of self preservation where it often takes shape as, “innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments, and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere” (Muñoz, 1996, p.6). Without Nancy having to explicitly reveal herself in the Compañeras piece, glimpses of her identity were nonetheless traceable in ways that reiterate a shared and embodied queer fronteriza practice of recognition.

This moment of recognition similarly recalls Avery Gordon’s positioning of transformative recognition as a product of haunting, and chasing emergent ghosts. Gordon situates haunting as the nature of something being there and not at the same time, to position the manifestation of ghosts as social figures that in turn warrant investigation. This investigation facilitates the bridging of history and subjectivity to create social life, that in turn affectively forces us to experience new knowledge(s) not as a desolate and static sites, but as those moments which viscerally expose structures of feeling across disciplines (Gordon, 2008, p.8). The same is ultimately true in my recognition of Nancy’s work in Companeras (1987), as apparitions of her located in the text became apparent in ways that illuminated her once concealed presence, and unveil an afterlife of queer fronteriza reckonings that transcend time and space.

In my oral history with Dr. Núñez-Mchiri (the author of the epigraph in this section and one of Nancy’s closest friends and frequent collaborators), I inquired about Nancy’s approach to her queerness and she provided further insight on the various generational and cultural influences that created tensions around Nancy’s self expression. In particular, she shared how Nancy’s work as a community arts educator shaped how she ordered her various identity prescriptions, saying:

I think in her times of performance that [queerness] was not centered, I think perhaps in her writing she felt more empowered to do that. But I think as an elder she was constantly having to navigate, ‘I work with children, I work with elders, elders can be older and more conservative, or hardcore Catholics, and I don't want my queerness to get in the way of them learning English. Or my queerness gets in the way of me working with children, I don't want parents to judge me on that…’ It is who she was in her multiple intersectionalities, Afro-Latina, queer, spiritualist, Santera, performer, musician…it was one of her identities but it wasn't her only identity…In the generation of Nancy and Juan Gabriel there was a phrase that Juan Gabriel often repeated, ‘Lo que se ve no se pregunta’, but ella siempre tenia su medalla, cuidaba mucha su energia (Gina Núñez-Mchiri, oral history, 2025).

Lo que se ve no se pregunta, which loosely translates to “that what is seen does not need to be asked,” epitomizes a mantra upheld by a generation of elder, transborder, queers of color that operates as an affirmation for survival. It offers a reading of queerness that must heavily rely on gesture (Rodríguez, 2014), the unspoken (Pérez, 2003), and the ephemeral as harm reductive strategies that both inform and camouflage the lived experience of elders and ancestors like Nancy trying to survive and build community along borders.

In the same year that Gloria Anzaldúa wrote Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and in it, her analysis of homophobia as the “fear of going home” (p. 41) in being rejected by both ones family and ones culture, Nancy too, was writing about Latina/e lesbian anxieties around homophobia as an Afro-Chicana from the U.S.-México border. The former is a widely cited and circulated text in the fields of women of color feminisms, borderlands theory, and Chicana/e and Latina/e lesbian thought, and the latter has scarcely, if ever, been acknowledged in the same intellectual conversations. It is not my intention to conduct a close reading of Nancy’s work against the grain of Anzaldúa's explication on homophobia, or argue that one should be considered more or less "canonical" than the other, but instead to demonstrate the elusiveness of the lo que se ve no se pregunta framework. If it preserves via deflection and covertly protects the livelihoods of queer of color existence in their lifetime(s), then what of it in death? This question builds on existing scholarship in Chicanx/Latinx lesbian and queer histories that have similarly necessitated the production of methodological frameworks to account for those stories which are inevitably rendered hidden (Cruz, 2001; Pérez, 2003; Roque Ramírez, 2010; Zepeda, 2022). Historian Yolanda Leyva^[2] has written about the task of unearthing Chicana/Latina lesbian histories in particular, as she considers the silences born out of these negotiations as paradoxically situated in how they protect at the same time that they create epistemic harms (Chávez Leyva, 1996; 1998). I echo these sentiments nearly thirty years later and similarly ask, what happens to the epistemological contributions of queer transborder cultural workers like Nancy, if no se ve, if they are not visible or recognizable?

I want to distinguish that I do not read Nancy’s deployment of lo que se ve no se pregunta and subsequent pseudonymization in Compañeras as evidence of her being any less “out” in comparison with other queer women of color of her generation conducting similar work. Conversely, I believe that her contributions through these avenues represent a larger historical experience that, in turn, envelopes queer of color thought as a body of knowledge. Where Dr. Núñez-Mchiri explains, “it was one of her identities but it wasn't her only identity,” it opens up an opportunity to sit with how Nancy’s approach to intersectionality might also be interpreted as a practice of differential consciousness, a weaving “between and among,” working with and against, and other similar logics that characterize the fluidity of queer Latina/e identity and consciousness (Anzaldúa, 2012; Moraga and Anzaldúa, 2021; Sandoval, 2000). A practice that in Nancy’s lived experience, compelled her to identify as Afro-Chicana first and foremost in her day to day community work, and as a lesbian in writing only.

While it is easy to read this move as merely a survival tactic on its face, it also becomes a moment to reflect on what might get lost when queerness is obfuscated from Nancy’s legacy. That is, how might we better think about the multiple identity categories that she occupied not as an ordered and hierarchical list, but as experiences that were mutually constitutive in ways similar to how scholars of queer of color critique have written around how social categories like race, gender, and sexuality inherently inform one another (Ferguson 2004; Somerville 2000; Moraga and Anzaldúa 2021). Ana M. Lara’s theorizing on Afro-Latina lesbian subjectivity insists that these negotiations require consistently birthing and re-examining the self across these categories. Lara (2010) cites Afro-Latina lesbianism as a lived experience that necessitates traversing, “...multiple spaces simultaneously, carrying ourselves and the weight of our histories. We come without mirrors, for in the eyes of a world in which we do not exist we have not yet been born” (p. 299). In thinking about Afro-Latina lesbian subjectivity as a practice in continually birthing and articulating the self, we might consider how Nancy’s queerness and Afro-Chicanidad might not be so distinct, even if they did generate friction(s) in her life and work. Even if she did not spell it out, they were nonetheless two components of her identity that cannot be bifurcated, but rather are social positions that enforce and create tensions in ways that are at times contradictory and also contextually and historically specific.

Lo que se ve no se pregunta as a mantra for queer fronteriza expression is illuminated by Nancy’s pseudonymized piece in Compañeras, “Homofobia: el miedo de una sociedad”. She begins the piece by crying out, “A cuántas de nosotras nos han rechazado nuestras familias por ser lesbianas? Cuántas de nosotras hemos escuchado de nuestras madres aquel dicho: “Mejor puta que pata?” (Lorenza, 1987, p. 232). The tone set here is one of urgency, a call for testimony around a collective experience via the use of “nosotras” that is echoed throughout the larger piece, and a critique of the colloquialism that asserts that it is better to be a whore than a “pata”.^[3] Nancy’s use of this anecdote rallies those who have been cut by these logics in their familial dynamics as she continues to lay the scene for the larger cultural issue, going on to describe homophobia as, “el miedo de que dos mujeres se toquen y se demuestren cariño en público. No se tolera. Sube la presión, se dan miradas que matan, se da la espalda, se escuchan rumores de burla, de asco” (Lorenza, 1987, p. 232). The piece is revelatory in describing the very thing Nancy was wary of experiencing in her professional and community oriented work, as noted by Núñez-Mchiri. If we view lo que se ve no se pregunta as subversive, rhetorical armor that preserves the immediate safety of queer of color fronterizas like Nancy, then her writing in Compañeras gives us further social and political context for its deployment in space like the U.S.-Mexico border.

Nancy, via the pseudonym ‘Lorenza’, was able to explore her lesbianism more deliberately in Compañeras in ways that allowed her to alleviate and further explore some of these tensions. That she used her middle name as a pseudonym suggests that perhaps, on some level, this work was never meant to be so tightly concealed, but approached more intentionally, with more care. The naming of ‘Lorenza’ as the writer of this piece resembles a disidentification, an alter ego, and a practice in speculative naming that further allowed her to explore the multiplicities of who she was (Muñoz, 1999). Lorenza then is not just an alias that allowed Nancy to communicate her experiences as a Latina lesbian through a lo que se ve no se pregunta approach, but ultimately illustrates that Nancy was not outright hiding her queerness either.

Much like a nickname or pet name that is intimately and affectionately used by one’s closest confidants, ‘Lorenza’ as the author of this text is not a binary identity parallel to Nancy, but is Nancy. Her continued writing in “Homofobia: el miedo de una sociedad,” further confirms this reading. Throughout the piece, Lorenza goes on to lament the censorship of lesbians in media, the pressure families place on their daughters to uphold the nuclear family, alongside the loss of friendships, while invoking a call to action for Latina/e lesbians:

La homofobia surge de muy adentro. ¿Te acuerdas del miedo que sentiste la primera vez que reconsiste que eras lesbiana? No importa la edad - de niña, de joven, ya de mujer. Ese miedo heredado de reconocer y aceptar que soy lesbiana ha surgido en mí, en tí. Pero cada una de nosotras tiene que vencer el miedo, esa ignorancia de nosotras mismas. Y en el proceso surgiremos como la fuerza del mar, venciendo la ignorancia de toda una sociedad. Sigamos pa’lante, Compañeras! (Lorenza, 1987, p. 233)

These final lines indicate that Lorenza was not any less “out” than her peers at the time, as she concludes her piece with a call in. In the text's final lines, she calls for a collective recognition and dismantling of internalized homophobia, as she adamantly encourages other Latina/e lesbians to do the emotional and spiritual work to liberate themselves from it. A surface level reading might critique Lorenza for urging others to embrace their lesbianism while writing under a pseudonym, but to me, this only makes her endeavor more compelling, albeit veiled. The text becomes a practice in doing the emotional and spiritual un-learning via writing that Lorenza calls for, by cathartic means. Reading Lorenza as Nancy, not as distinct and opposing identities supports this reading and also urges us to consider what being “out” might mean outside of Western binary designations. It further situates the other side of the lo que se ve, no se pregunta framework, as it allowed Nancy, via Lorenza, to be “out” in a way that was compatible with her work as community educator in El Paso-Ciudad Juárez. Importantly, the piece and its publication ask us to consider what it means for contributions from queer of color cultural workers to not be found, but seen, both in the historical record and in our engagements with them. Queer fronteriza recognition relies on this distinction and acknowledges the labors of care and discretion that queer of color cultural workers have had to invoke across disciplines. Moreover, queer fronteriza recognition highlights the profundity in those moments where recognition spills out of the text, out of the archive, and into the hands of those who continue to remap and make evident the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, class, and borders.

We might view Lorenza as she appears in this piece in Compañeras as the vessel through which Nancy was able to articulate and textually embody her lesbianism in ways that allowed her to move in and around it. She was able to express a shared experience amongst Latina/e lesbians that especially resonates for lesbians along geopolitical borders, who navigate being “out” in ways that at times read as contradictory and do not neatly fit in mainstream conceptions of what it means to come out. However, as the oral history with Dr. Núñez-Mchiri indicates, her queerness was not her only identity, but rather one of many. And while this section and the piece from Compañeras are texts that aim to recuperate this specific part of who she was, the following looks to another tool she used in her artistic practice and networking that leaned more into how she saw herself as an Afro-Chicana online.

Second Life and Afro-Chicana Digital Embodiment

. “I always admired how avant garde she was with technology…She produced and she didn't ask for permission. She was producing music, she was producing avatars, she was producing experiences, and in these spaces she was engaging with all these amazing creatives”(Gina Núñez-Mchiri, oral history, 2025).

Second Life initially launched in 2003 and was pitched as a 3D multiplayer role-playing virtual world that allowed users to generate avatars to interact with one another online. An early Web 2.0 advancement of a chatroom, the site allowed for users to participate in virtual social gatherings, conferences, and classes. Users were given free rein to explore the “grid” and engage in a range of activities similar to those in real life, including gambling, selling and trading virtual items, listening to music, flirting, playing games, and even sex (Kalning, 2007). The Smithsonian began utilizing Second Life as a viable social media platform for their Latino Virtual Museum (LVM) programming in 2009, and uploaded scans to create 3D replicas of artifacts that operated as virtual galleries and exhibits detailing Latinx art and histories. Participants in the LVM were able to access these exhibits and workshops while also engaging with Día de los Muertos poetry slams, oral histories, digital bailes, all while learning more about Latinx art across different mediums (Smithsonian Institution Archives, 2023). It was in this capacity that Nancy was first introduced to the site.

Núñez-Mchiri recounted how Nancy’s desire to be on the cutting edge of technology influenced the kind of work she produced in her life. With regard to Nancy’s participation in Second Life, Núñez-Mchiri recalled, “She created her own avatar and had this presence…and she would say, ‘Gina you got to be part of this!’ and I remember telling her, Nancy I barely can handle one life and you want me to have a second one?”(Gina Núñez-Mchiri, oral history, 2025). Aside from being a clever play on words that demonstrated Nancy’s propensity to the digital via Second Life, Núñez-Mchiri’s comment here also serves as a segue for thinking about how Second Life’s early framing and evocation is congruent with scholarship and conversations around digital utopianism in the early 2000s. Second Life’s marketing as a space that was framed in direct opposition to “real life” and the “real world,” participates in a rhetoric of digital utopianism where cyberspace is configured as a liberatory “second” world marked by fluid boundaries that differentiates it from the constraints of “real” world. Digital utopianism ultimately overlooked the origins of the Internet's evocation as a tool for the U.S. military, and by extension the ways in which it inevitably reasserted national boundaries and surveillance technologies (humdog, 1994; Nakamura, 2002; Rodríguez, 2014).

Tom Boellstorff challenged framings of the “real” and the “not-real” inherent to digital utopian rhetoric in his ethnography of Second Life in 2008. Boellstorff noted the frequency in which his interlocutors would use terms like, “real life,” “first life,” or “the real world” to describe being offline. In his analysis, he argues that these framings incorrectly suggest that the presence of technology is what makes life less “real” or meaningful, and conversely downplays the very “real” forms of kinship, communication, and social bonds that marked social communities like those in Second Life (Boellstorff, 2015). Here, the boundaries of the “real” and the “not-real”, the virtual and the artificial, are intentionally eroded. Virtual worlds are not just sites where online interactions are merely siloed off into their corresponding corners of the Internet, but are instead regarded as interactions that are keenly shaped by the ramifications of the “real” world and the people who shape them. Boellstorff’s analysis remains significant in how it allows for a capacious reading of digital interactions in online spaces like Second Life and other social media platforms that have since emerged, that in turn gives scholars and users alike the language to frame emergent digital worlds. Nancy’s participation in Second Life (see Figure 2) in this sense becomes a digital afterlife, another ghost through which to continue troubling designations of the “real” and the “not-real” alongside the navigation of identity via avatar construction that became prevalent amid the rise of Web 2.0 in the early 2000s.

During the era in which sites like Second Life were at their cultural prominence, considerations for gender and racial prescriptions in how individuals were performing the self online via avatars was prevalent. Cybertypes, or the process by which race, racial stereotypes, and racism broadly becomes embedded, commodified, and reinscribed online, additionally highlights the double edged nature of visibility and surveillance online (Nakamura, 2002). Cybertypes in these terms perpetuates whiteness as norm at the same time that it fetishizes, erases, and consumes non-white embodiment in digital spaces. The disembodiment of non-white and, more specifically, Black bodies online at once necessitates the need for redress at the same time this articulation remains under the larger backdrop of Western technoculture and its institutions. As this relates to the potential for theorizing black femme digital presence, Ozichi Okorom has argued how these processes are imposed onto users who are tasked with making, “themselves and their bodies known and consumable in order to reclaim power in digital space by positioning themselves in opposition to “cybertypes” (Okorom, 2025, p.7). Thus, Nancy’s articulation of herself, and more specifically her identity as an Afro-Chicana via her avatar on Second Life should be thought of similarly to her work in Compañeras, both as expressions of embodiment that while at times seemingly fraught, are also textual and visual indicators of how she viewed her queerness and Blackness respectively.

Shortly after the Smithsonian Latino Center implemented Second Life into their cultural programming in 2009, they quickly expanded their efforts to facilitate an annual Day of the Dead Festival hosted on the site that same year. The Day of the Dead Festival as they positioned it, strived to honor the traditional Mexican holiday through a variety of workshops including those centered around games, storytelling, poetry readings, digital altar building, and other literary and musical events. Nancy was not only involved early on in the Day of the Dead Festival programming, but frequently facilitated many of the online workshops via her avatar as early as 2010. In these instances, Nancy read poetry, hosted storytelling workshops, led art workshops designed for K-12 students, and even performed percussion (Audience Opinions, 2011). She was an integral part of the LVM’s programming for their Day of the Dead Festival and their Second Life programming, as she especially utilized their virtual Sin Fronteras Café as a space to workshop her own creative writing.

While she was active in the Sin Fronteras Café since at least 2010, here, I look specifically to Nancy’s poetry reading for the event in 2014. After being introduced as the event's opener in the Sin Fronteras Café (a building resembling a Spanish-style hacienda), Nancy stands in the center of a terracotta tiled room with teal walls in front of a large poster with event details accompanied by Latinx art, with an audience of other attendees’ avatars seated in front of her. Her avatar is dressed in jeans, a t-shirt with a sugar skull on the front, a red long-sleeved undershirt, and a long black cape that provides an almost mystical quality to her look. Similar to her appearance in life, her avatar has a medium grey haired afro, and wears circular gold rimmed sunglasses that pull the look together. I pause in this moment before Nancy begins her reading to emphasize how she performs a kind of embodiment that negotiates both the self and the social. The self, in how Nancy’s avatar dons many of the same physical attributes as she does in life, and the social in how she utilizes clothing and dress as a nod to the event’s theme. Nancy performed a version of herself via her avatar that comparatively resembled how she actually looked, similar to the use of her pseudonym ‘Lorenza’ in Compañeras (1987), rather than performing a new persona/identity altogether. This is significant not only in terms of thinking about how she performs a Black digital presence in a space that is composed of mostly non-Black Latinx avatars, but also in how her presence in the space conveys tensions in how she is at once liminally situated while at the same time remaining hypervisible as an Afro-Chicana (Brock 2019; Okorom 2025). Bridging the self and the social in these terms becomes crucial in understanding how Nancy both performs and negotiates her Afro-Latinidad in relation to the LVM, and additionally situates a fronteriza epistemological approach that utilizes technologies like Second Life to embody these distinctions of belonging across different boundaries.

This performance under the virtual backdrop of a Spanish-style hacienda, an architectural symbol of Latinidad that conjures images of colonial violence for primarily Indigenous and Black communities, is telling for two reasons. First, Nancy’s embodiment via her avatar maintains her Blackness in opposition to dominant prioritizations of whiteness as norm in a technological sense. Here, my reading of Nancy’s avatar attends to Catherine Knight-Steele’s call for a shift in framings of technoculture to de-prioritize “whiteness” and “maleness” as dominant ideologies, and in turn emphasize Black feminist technoculture as a critical lens through which to examine digital technology and society (Steele, 2021, p. 152). Nancy’s digital presence in her avatar illustrates and crafts an image of the self that does not conform to or accommodate whiteness but preserves Black femme embodiment as a major component of how she presented in mostly non-Black digital spaces. Second, her articulation of her Blackness in the LVM and under the backdrop of hacienda-esque/colonial imaginings, also intervenes in dominant prioritizations of whiteness in hierarchies of Latinidad (Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, 2010, p. 13). Though she does not explicitly comment on her Afro Latinidad, her presentation can be read as a re-articulation of Black embodiment in a predominantly white/mestizo/a space, as it is intimately tied to her lived experience as an Afro-Chicana across multiple sites. The LVM highlights contradictions in Latinidad that are then mediated (Nakamura, 2008) by the presence of users like Nancy, whose embodiment asks us to consider these seemingly unspoken tensions in larger legacies of race, gender, and colonialism inherent in conceptions of Latinidad.

I do not suggest that Nancy’s embodiment here is an inherently liberatory or resistive act, but rather one that can be pointed to in addressing Afro-Chicana embodiment as it relates to larger understandings and histories of technoculture and Latinidad concurrently. As André Brock has commented on the tendency for Black digital embodiment(s) and practices to be limited in being taken up in explicitly rebellious, resistant, and therefore commoditized dialogues (Brock, 2019, p.30), I similarly contend that Nancy’s performance of her Afro-Latinidad in Second Life instead offers an insight into how digital spaces have mediated relationships between social categories like Blackness and whiteness, and in this case, legacies of Latinidad. Similar to Steele’s attention to a study of Black digital feminism that asks what Black feminist thinkers leave behind rather than directly asking them about their experiences with technology (2021, p.12), interacting with and reading Nancy’s Second Life avatar in this sense, produced a digital afterlife that allowed me to postulate how Nancy might have attended to these contentions.

Conclusion/Hijas de su Madre

“She would invite me to her events and if I could go I would show up. But I can guarantee if I invited her to something. I mean, she probably didn't miss it. Maybe my family wasn't able to go for some reason, but Nancy was always there for me.” (Claudia Ley, oral history, 2025).

I close this article with a plática with Claudia Ley, the author of this section’s excerpt. Ley is a third generation jeweler and former arts curator, of Mexican and Chinese descent from El Paso, Texas, and late mentee of Nancy. Ley, who was a student of Dr. Nuñez-Michiri’s was introduced to Nancy by Núñez-Michiri, and in spite of their over 20 year age difference, they became fast friends. In our plática, Ley mentioned that they bonded over their common interests, including but not limited to their shared love of all things women and art, and especially house music (Claudia Ley, oral history, 2025). I situate this plática towards the end of this piece to emphasize the power of intergenerational community work and kinship shared among fronterizas in the region, and to similarly highlight the profound influence Nancy had in the community in her day to day life.

In our plática Ley mentions one of the first projects that she and Nancy collaborated on was an event called,“Hijas de su Madre” that ran from April of 2013 until August of 2014 in El Paso. Hijas de su Madre was a project that was born out of conversations amongst women in the community about their initial introductions to reproductive health, and culminated in Ley applying for a grant with the city of El Paso that aimed to openly discuss reproductive and sexual health topics that were deemed taboo, or otherwise received little to no formal education in the region. Of the initial thought process behind the event and bringing Nancy on, Ley recalled:

So I was working on this project that researched women's health, what top five health issues affecting women here in the border and, you know, health issues that are considered taboo. And I combined it with art making and a way to capture people's stories. So creating, you know, being in a creative environment, the confianza, where people felt comfortable going in there and working on something as we shared our stories. So I knew Nancy was a therapist, you know, she had been a therapist, counselor, and it was important for me that at each one of these five different workshops, because they were all on different topics, that we did have a healthcare professional, somebody that was actually able to talk about the topic (Claudia Ley, oral history, 2025).

Hijas de su Madre as a community event is significant here not only for the topics and goals it set out to address, but I find that its success and scope are critical in how it was able to physically make space for people to share their experiences to collective relations of care. In looking at how this work is done, rather than only analyzing what is done with events like Hijas de su Madre, that I argue is a critical lesson built out of larger queer and feminist organizing genealogies in El Paso-Juárez. Creating work that is centered on relations of care, world building, sitting in frictions, always extending outwards, directly into the larger community, are themes that make up Nancy’s legacy. In it, she embodied what it means to utilize lived experience as a method for shaping collectivities, creating networks and epistemologies that go beyond off and online, beyond life and death.

How Nancy navigated performances of her identity as a queer, Afro-Chicana, and fronteriza elder reveals various afterlives of these embodiments across different media. In both her writing in Compañeras (1987) and in her avatar in Second Life she performed her multiple identities and their intersections in ways that both reflected her lived experience, and ultimately utilized media not just as a mere representation of these identities, but as a practice in constructing it. Nancy’s use of different technologies in her lifetime and now in her passing, illustrates queer fronteriza expression that does not overtly romanticize technology as a tool of supposed progress, but instead exemplifies it as a practice that teases out its implications and contradictions across different registers and temporalities. Nancy Lorenza Green is just one of many of these ancestors whose work and politics transcends borders, and reminds those of us who find ourselves in and among them, that the tools to think against them are embodied and best practiced in community through mutual recognition.

Author Information

References

Anzaldúa, G. (2012). Borderlands: La frontera: the new Mestiza (4th ed). Aunt Lute Books.
Audience Opinions: The Day of the Dead Festival and Smithsonian Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life (p. 77). (2011). Smithsonian Institution, Office of Policy and Analysis. https://repository.si.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/eb9d2dc6-560c-41c4-8186-833283bb4b9a/content
Bhattacharya, K. (2017). Fundamentals of Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315231747
Boellstorff, T. (2015). Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human (First new edition paperback). Princeton University Press.
Brock, A. L. (2019). Distributed blackness: African American cybercultures. New York University Press.
Caswell, M., Punzalan, R., and Sangwand, T.-K. (2017). Critical Archival Studies: An Introduction. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.50
Chávez Leyva, Y. (1996). Breaking the Silence: Putting Latina Lesbian History at the Center. In The New Lesbian Studies, edited by Bonnie Zimmerman and Toni A. H. McNaron, (pp. 141–51). New York: Feminist Press.
Chávez Leyva, Y. (1998). Listening to the Silences in Latina/Chicana Lesbian History. In Living Chicana Theory, edited by Carla Trujillo (pp. 429-434) Third Woman Press Berkley.
Cotera, M. E. (2021). Fleshing the archive: Reflections on Chicana memory practice. Oral History, 49(2), 49–56. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48670157
Cruz, C. (2001). Toward an epistemology of a brown body. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(5), 657–669. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390110059874
Fierros, C. O., and Bernal, D. D. (2016). VAMOS A PLATICAR: The Contours of Pláticas as Chicana/Latina Feminist Methodology. Chicana/Latina Studies, 15(2), 98–121. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43941617
Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique. University of Minnesota Press.
Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination (New University of Minnesota Press ed). University of Minnesota Press.
Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe, 12(2), 1–14. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/3/article/241115.
Heidenreich, L. (2020). Nepantla squared: Transgender mestiz@ histories in times of global shift. University of Nebraska Press.
humdog. (1994). pandora’s vox: On community in cyberspace. Gist. https://gist.github.com/kolber/2131643
Jiménez Román, M., and Flores, J. (Eds.). (2010). The Afro-Latin@ reader: History and culture in the United States. Duke University Press.
Kalning, K. (2007, March 12). If Second Life isn’t a game, what is it? NBC News. https://web.archive.org/web/20130610073943/http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17538999/ns/technology_and_science-games/t/if-second-life-isnt-game-what-it
Lara, A. M. (2010). Uncovering Mirrors: Afro-Latina Lesbian Subjects. In The Afro-Latin@ Reader (pp. 298–313). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822391319-046
Lorenza (1987). Homofobia: el miedo de una sociedad. In Compañeras: Latina Lesbians; an Anthology, edited by Juanita Ramos (pp. 232-233) New York: Latina Lesbian History Project.
Moraga, C., and Anzalduá, G. (Eds.). (2021). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color (Fortieth anniversary edition). State University of New York Press.
Muñoz, J. E. (1996). Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 8(2), 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/07407709608571228
Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. University of Minnesota Press.
Nakamura, L. (2002). Cybertypes: Race, ethnicity, and identity on the Internet. Routledge.
Nakamura, L. (2008). Digitizing race: Visual cultures of the Internet. University of Minnesota Press.
Okorom, O. (2025). “Robot got future, i don’t”: Black femme liminal performance in SZA’s “Ghost in the Machine.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2025.2552503
Pérez, E. (2003). Queering the Borderlands: The Challenges of Excavating the Invisible and Unheard. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 24(2/3), 122–131. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3347351
Roque Ramírez, H. N. (2010). Gay Latino Histories/ Dying to Be Remembered: AIDS Obituaries, Public Memory, and the Queer Latino Archive. In G. M. Pérez (Ed.), Beyond El Barrio (pp. 103–128). New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814768563.003.0009
Ramos, J. (Ed.). (1987). Compañeras: Latina lesbians; an anthology. Latina Lesbian History Project.
Rodriguez, J. M. (2003). Queer latinidad: Identity practices, discursive spaces. New York University Press.
Rodríguez, J. M. (2014). Sexual futures, queer gestures, and other Latina longings. NYU Press.
Russell, L. (2020). Glitch feminism: A manifesto. Verso.
Salazar, Alexandra. (2023) Jotxs y Recuerdos: Podcasting as a form of Digital Borderlands, Guest Lecture in Intro to Mexican-American and Latina/o Studies, The University of Texas at Austin.
Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. University of Minnesota Press.]
Smith, L. T. (2022). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (Third edition). Bloomsbury Academic.
Smithsonian Institution Archives. (2023, September 15). Smithsonian Institution Archives [Facebook Post]. https://www.facebook.com/SmithsonianInstitutionArchives/posts/now-on-view-at-the-national-museum-of-american-history-and-online-presente-a-lat/707119588118881/
Smithsonian Latino Center Mobile Outreach (Director). (2015, October 10). Dead Poets Open Mic: Nancy Green [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f09rCA0IBqM
Somerville, S. B. (2000). Queering the color line: Race and the invention of homosexuality in American culture. Duke University Press.
Steele, C. K. (2021). Digital Black feminism. New York University Press.
Underberg, N. M., and Zorn, E. (2013). Digital ethnography: Anthropology, narrative, and new media (1st ed). University of Texas Press.
Zepeda, S. J. (2022). Queering Mesoamerican diasporas: Remembering Xicana indígena ancestries. University of Illinois Press.

Oral history references

Ley, Claudia. Oral History. Zoom. May 15, 2025.
Núñez-Mchiri, Guillermina ‘Gina’. Oral History. Zoom, April 16, 2025.

Notes

1. i The University of Texas at Austin. Corresponding author. Contact: [email protected]

   ↑

2. In addition to being a renowned Chicana/Latina borderlands historian, Leyva also had a close friendship with Nancy as they frequently collaborated on community projects together in El Paso. Their connection alongside Leyva’s scholarship on the elusiveness of Chicana/Latina lesbian histories is not coincidental, as much as it reveals the real life connections that inform Chicana/Latina lesbian networks.

   ↑

3. The use of the slang word “pata” here translates to female duck, and is evoked disparagingly to describe lesbians and gender non-conforming women.

   ↑