About

Introduction

This digital repository offers a window into the personal and literary world of Luis Zapata (1951–2020), nationally and internationally recognized as one of the most important writers of Mexican gay literature.

The project makes available a catalogue of his personal library alongside more than 500 digitized documents from his archive, including personal and professional correspondence from the 1960s through 2020, some unpublished texts, and articles published in cultural journals. The published materials contribute to a broader understanding of the writer’s personal and interpersonal life, as well as his cultural and literary affinities. The project aims to serve as a research tool for biographical, bibliographical, and literary scholarship on Zapata in particular, and on Mexican LGBT literature in general.

The digitization was made possible through a FLAGS grant from Yale’s LGBT Studies program. It was carried out by Alan Mendoza Sosa, a doctoral candidate with interests in Latin American LGBT literature, and supervised by Professor Alexander Gil Fuentes, a digital humanities scholar in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale and associate director of the Creative Forum, an initiative that connects literary creation with research.

The archive and catalogue were launched on April 27, 2024, which would have marked Luis Zapata’s 73rd birthday.