Latinx Spring 2021 Speaker Series -Art as Civil Disobedience: Blackness, migration, and criminality w/ Special Guest Alan Pelaez Lopez

Art as Civil Disobedience: Blackness, migration, and criminality

What does it mean to write poetry when you can be criminalized, incarcerated and deported at any moment? This is the reality for many undocumented, refugee, asylee, and migrant creators. This art talk centers Alan Pelaez Lopez’s relationship to poetry as a place of refuge in which to process state-violence, but also a place of contestation because if the artist says too much, their family and friends can also become targets of the state. Ethical cultural production will be at the heart of this art talk as a way to de-center productivity, a measure that is by default anti-black and anti-Black and anti-migrant.

About Alan Pelaez Lopez

Alan Pelaez Lopez is an AfroZapotec artist from Oaxaca, México. They are the author ofIntergalactic Travels:poems from a fugitive alien(The Operating System, 2020) andto love and mourn in the age of displacement(Nomadic Press, 2020). Much of their writing honors the messiness of grief, love, social movements, & reconciliation. They live in Oakland, CA and have been organizing with undocumented LGBTQIA+ migrants for ten years. More at @migrantscribble.

Campus Partner

College of Ethnic Studies - Latina/Latino Studies