Emma Pérez

In 2020, Emma Pérez was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters, a distinguished honor society founded in 1936 to celebrate Texas literature and to recognize distinctive literary achievement.

Since 2017, Pérez has been a research social scientist at the Southwest Studies Center at the University of Arizona where she is also a professor in the Gender and Women's Studies department.

Her second novel, published in 2009, Forgetting the Alamo, Or Blood Memory, is a historical fiction set against the backdrop of the 1836 battles of the Alamo and of San Jacinto. It is a tale of travel and adventure that narrates the story of a young cross-dressing tejana and her romance with a mixed race woman, both of whom are witnesses to the racial complexities of the southwest during this turbulent period. It is suggested that the novel "inverts the traditional Alamo narrative" in order to highlight the racial violence of that historic event. Forgetting the Alamo won the Christopher Isherwood Writing Grant in 2009, the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies Regional Book Award for fiction in 2011 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in 2010. According to Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association "Forgetting the Alamo, Or Blood Memory" proposes that sexuality and gender are inextricably linked to language, culture, and race, something that has been under-theorized in many articulations of queer and feminist theory".

The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999) is recognized as one of the founding influences of decolonial studies and of queer of color critique. It is credited with offering new understandings of Chicano historiography by highlighting the role of archival silences, erasures, and omissions in the production of knowledge. Pérez argues that the shadow of colonialism inflects how history is understood and challenges readers to construct a "decolonial imaginary" as a way to challenge dominant narratives of history. The book develops the idea of third space feminism by looking at different discursive events including Yucatán's Socialist Revolution, El Partido Liberal Mexicano, and Texas social clubs. Pérez's theoretical formation is credited with connecting Chicana and women of color feminist thought to the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Homi Bhaba and other postcolonial theorists.

Pérez's first literary work, Gulf Dreams, published in 1996, is a coming of age story set in a small racist Texas town. It touches on childhood sexual abuse, the legacies of colonialism, sexual repression, and same-sex desire and is considered to be one of the first Chicana lesbian novels in print.

Pérez was a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso (1990–2003), where she became the Chair of the History Department. In 2003, she became a professor and the chair of the department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and taught in their Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies.

Pérez was born in El Campo, Texas in October 25, 1954. In 1979, she received an undergraduate degree in political science and women's studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. She obtained her master's and doctorate in history from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1982 and 1988, respectively.