Abstract
This essay argues that a queer archive in Felicia Luna Lemus’s Like Son (2007) recovers the historical Mexican figure Nahui Olin and allows the trans protagonist to navigate less tangible inheritances, including a destructive romantic legacy and a complex Mexican American identity. This essay asks whether, and how, inheritances can be curated and posits that queer archival practices are useful for simultaneously drawing from and rejecting powerful familial and cultural legacies. At the end the essay situates Like Son as part of a group of contemporary Chicana/o texts that claim control over the access and representation of Chicana/o histories and imagine queer futures through queer archives and archival practices. The affective and political possibilities of these queer archives further discourse of the interdisciplinary archival turn. U.S. multiethnic literature is often lauded for helping to fill in the gaps of the dominant historical archive by providing access to silenced histories of the Americas, yet contemporary Chicana/o texts such as Like Son also challenge the epistemologies and power structures that undergird institutional archives.
