ABSTRACT
La loteria mexicana is a game beloved throughout Mexico and Mexican-American communities in the united states (U.S). This chapter provides a brief sociohistorical context of the game and reviews the role of loteria in popular culture; especially contemporary re-imaginings that are instrumental in questioning heteronormativity. It examines how Loteria: A Novel by Mario Alberto Zambrano performs Latin American immigrant intersectionality. The various queer loteria adaptations examined here open up possibilities of resistance against heteronormative expectations and social injustices that limit life chances. Loteria is just one of many games used worldwide socialize children into heteronormative pathways. While loteria serves as a potential source of ethnic pride for Latin Americans and Latinas/os in the U.S, some may be concerned with its continuation of strict gender norms. Frederick Aldama argues that despairing over problematic Latina/o representations in popular culture ignores the power of human imagination to reappropriate those images for positive identity construction.
