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Gabriel S. Estrada (ze/zir) was born in Fullerton, California, in the same hospital as both of zir parents, though zir roots run much deeper than any one city. Zir mother’s line, is Chicana/Mexicana, and Rarámuri; zir father’s side is Chicano/Mexicano and Caxcan with family rooted in the Sierra Madre Occidental of northern Mexico. Gabriel likes to describe zirself as “one body, four grandparents,” a living map of that mountain range.
As an infant, ze was carried north to Pullman, Washington, and then Moscow, Idaho, where zir parents organized with the Chicano Movement. Young Gabriel found zir own quiet way back to those ancestral lands in the wildflowers ze passed on the walk to school, often arriving late after stopping to admire them.
Gabriel’s parents divorced when ze was still young, and the family moved often: from Spokane, to zir grandparents’ house in Sacramento, to Laguna Beach, before settling back in Sacramento for high school. Gabriel doesn’t remember one clear moment of coming out, since classmates were already asking if ze was gay by seventh grade, before ze had the words to answer them. What ze found instead was a small group of misfits: queer kids, Mexican kids, and Jewish kids, who made their own place to belong. By high school, ze was doing theater, taking honors classes, and bussing tables at a queer-friendly restaurant.
At UC Berkeley, Gabriel started in religious studies before moving into anthropology. Zir‘s fieldwork took zir into San Francisco’s Mission District, where ze studied HIV activism up close and danced with Teocalli, a local Mexica and Indigenous dance troupe. Ze came out first as bisexual, then as gay. It wasn’t until zir PhD at the University of Arizona that Gabriel found the word that finally fit: Two Spirit, a term rooted in Native traditions for people who carry a balance of masculine and feminine energy within one person. In Tucson, surrounded by Xicanx, Apache, Tohono O’odham, and Yoeme communities, ze finally felt like ze belonged.
In 2001, not long before ze began teaching at California State University, Long Beach, Gabriel tested positive for HIV. For years, ze quietly feared that being found out could get zir fired, a fear that only eased once ze earned tenure. Gabriel ultimately became an openly HIV+ community board member of the Red Circle Project and AIDS Project Los Angeles, then co-founded and served as secretary of the City of Angels Two-Spirit Society. Ze also spent two decades writing about Indigenous and Two Spirit film, one article at a time, work that has grown into zir 2026 book, Queer Indigenous Cinema: Sovereign Genders from Seven Directions. Looking back, Gabriel sees the book as an adult version of something ze’d been doing since childhood without realizing it: chasing Xochipili, the flower child spirit, the same pull that once made zir late for school admiring wildflowers on the way there.
Gabriel speaks about zir life with the warmth of a natural teacher: quick to laugh, and quicker to credit the people who helped zir get here, from mentors and boyfriends to elders and community. Through nearly every story ran the same thread: the mountain range in Chihuahua, Zacatecas, and Durango zir family came from, the animals and flowers of zir genderqueer childhood, the Nahuatl language and Queer Spirit classes ze still teaches at the college.
