Del Otro Lado (From the Other Side): Transnational Latinx AIDS Activism from IRCA to NAFTA

Since the onset of the US AIDS epidemic in 1981, Latinx people have been overrepresented. By 1990, Latinx people accounted for 17 percent of all cases nationally yet comprised only 9 percent of the population. Although scholarship has begun to consider the role Latinx people played in AIDS activism, less has been written on its transnational nature. Directing their efforts not just to US Latinx communities but to Latin American communities throughout the Global South, the broader and more global perspective of Latinx AIDS activists can be attributed to their strong cultural and social ties to their countries of origin, a pattern sustained by 1980s anti-immigrant rhetoric. An emphasis on Latinx AIDS activists reveals how AIDS coincided with punitive changes in US immigration policies. In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act granted legal status to three million undocumented immigrants. But it did so as it conferred the INS with a 50 percent increase in funds for border enforcement, making it more difficult for Mexicans in the US to return to Mexico. How did activists negotiate this seemingly impermeable border? In “Del Otro Lado,” I document the direct action, service provision, and cultural production that Latinx AIDS activists harnessed in relation to the anti-immigrant and anti-welfare practices of neoliberal statecraft. I examine the actions, meetings, and political ephemera of Latinx AIDS activists from Cara-A-Cara, the National Latino/a Lesbian & Gay Organization, and Proyecto SIDA Tijuana. By framing the AIDS epidemic as a transnational occurrence that intersected with legacies of racism, capitalism, and xenophobia, these Latinx AIDS activists pursued a politics across bodies and borders, one that stretched beyond the ethos of “drugs into bodies.” The stories of these activists provide us with the grammar to articulate alternative strategies in the pursuit against disease and ill health at home and abroad.