Deb Vargas

Deborah R. Vargas is Professor jointly appointed in the Programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Vargas is also faculty affiliate with the Program in American Studies and the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Vargas’ work engages the fields of queer studies, feminist studies, Chicana/e Latina/e Studies, and American Studies with an emphasis on the cultural politics of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.  Vargas is the author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda, awarded Best Book in Chicana/o Studies, The Woody Guthrie Prize for Best Book in Popular Music Studies and honorable mention for Outstanding Book in Latino Studies, Latin American Studies Association. Vargas is co-editor with Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes of Keywords for Latina/o Studies (New York University Press).

Vargas is also the author of Down and Dirty: Toward a Sucialogy of Queer Chicane Life (Duke University Press) that explores queer Chicana/e working-class aesthetics, vernaculars, and social spaces ranging from photographic series by Xandra Ybarra and Star Montana, cantina bars, and the varrio figures of the ruca, torcida, and hyna. Sucias are those who cultivate methods of refusal to the politics of respectability and propriety within racial capitalism and normative projects of “American” and “Latino” citizenship to sustain queer life forces. 

Vargas’ other current research projects include: “Frequencies of Brown Soul,” that considers singers such as Freddy Fender, Black and Mexican recording sessions in San Antonio and Dallas, as well as contemporary Chicane soul bands such as The Sinseers and The Suffers. Vargas is also researching the life and music of singer Linda Ronstadt.

Vargas has conducted oral histories with Chicana singers for the Smithsonian Institute’s Latino Music Oral History Program and written for National Public Radio’s “Turning the Tables” music series. Vargas has been awarded fellowships from The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, The University of California Humanities Research Institute, The Ford Foundation and The Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science. Vargas received her B.S. in Communications and B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of Texas, Austin and her Ph.D. in Sociology (Feminist Studies certificate) from the University of California, Santa Cruz.