Lionel Cantú

Lionel Cantú Jr. was born in San Antonio, Texas, to parents Lionel and Rosario Cantú.[3] He was one four siblings: two sisters, Rose Louise and Rachel Diane; and one brother, Charles.[2] As a San Antonio native, Cantú attended the University of Texas at San Antonio and graduated with a Bachelor's in Psychology and Spanish in 1991.[4] He continued his education at the University of California, Irvine, where he held the title of co-chair of the university's Lesbian and Gay Faculty/Staff network for nearly six years, while also founding a speaker series on sexuality-related topics called, the Lilac Collective.[4] In 1998, Cantú was named University of California, Irvine's Lauds and Laurels Outstanding Graduate Student, and earned his Master's and Doctoral degrees in social science with a focus on social relations and feminist studies in 1999.[3] Later that year, he became an assistant professor in sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also received a UC President's Doctoral Fellowship to become a University of California, Davis postdoctoral researcher studying “how American gay culture was becoming globalized and commodified.” [2]

Much of Dr. Lionel Cantú's literary work focuses on queer issues, migrant issues, race and ethnicity, and U. S. Latinos. His high regard among sociologists, however, is a result of his extensive research on how and when issues of sexuality and migration intersect.[3] Cantú's dissertation, Border Crossings: Mexican Men and the Sexuality of Migration, is an example of how he explored the relatively new area of research, which concerns Mexican men who have sex with men and how their sexual identity alters in multiple cultural settings. His book of a similar title, The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men, was published posthumously in 2009 by New York University Press, and was compiled and edited by Nancy A. Naples and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz.[2] Cantu et al. take up the issue of the relationship of homosexuals to immigration policies and nationalist discourse in his essay, “Well Founded Fear, Political Asylum and the Boundaries of Sexual Identity in the US-Mexico Borderlands.” In particular, Cantu discusses the complex performance of sexuality, gender and race expected from gay asylum seekers, thus reinforcing the conventional notions of gender and sexuality in a transnational crossroad that facilitates movement of commodities, cultures and people. He discusses how the US asylum system and nationalist discourse problematize the transnational intersections of race, gender and sexuality because,“The asylum system was generating new, essentializing constructions of sexuality that functioned within strictly nationalist logics, thereby re-inscribing borders that globalization had blurred” (301).[5]

Following hospitalization and surgery to attend to a ruptured lower intestine, Dr. Lionel Cantú died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest on May 26, 2002.[3] Cantú is survived by his life partner, Hernando Molinares of Santa Cruz, California and his parents, two sisters, and one brother.[2] Two days after his death, family, friends, and colleagues crowded into a “standing room only” memorial service to remember Cantú at the Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California, the largest church in the city.[2] On June 3, 2004, the UC Santa Cruz Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Intersex Resource Center was renamed in his honor to The Lionel Cantú Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Intersex Resource Center.[2] After Cantú's death, students and faculty from various areas of study formed the Lionel Cantú working group, in efforts to finish the projects that were in progress during the final moments of the scholar's life.[2] With the help of Nancy Naples and other members of the group such as Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Patricia Zavella, Craig Reinarman, Olga Nájara-Ramírez, and Sarita Gaytan, Cantú's most profound work became published, including his book, The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men.[2]