Daniela Valdes researches the history of gender diverse people of color in the twentieth century United States. Based on extensive research in the archives of criminalization of New York City and oral histories with trans and gender nonconforming people of color, Valdes’s dissertation offers a grassroots social history of working-class Black and Brown gender diverse New Yorkers from the Great Migrations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans at midcentury to the early twenty-first century. Her dissertation is a working-class history that broaches forms of survival and resistance, including participation in the informal economy. Additionally, she examines the under-researched historical connections between the carceral state and psychiatry showing how the era of mass public order policing underwrote the criminalization and pathologization of racialized, queered, and disabled people that continues to this day.
Daniela is a gender nonconforming Latine scholar and fellow with the Center for Engaged Scholarship for the 2024-2025 academic year. Their article "In the Shadow of the Health-Care City: Historicizing Trans Latinx Immigrant Experiences during the Coronavirus Pandemic" won the Antonia Castañeda Prize for best article on women’s Latina and Indigenous history from the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies.
She serves as the chair of the community advisory board for “Y’all Better Quiet Down”: Trans BIPOC Digitization Initiative” of the Digital Transgender Archive. Previously, they worked with the Rikers Public Memory Project where she co-created the documentary Story by Story: Building A People’s History of Rikers Island.