Alan Pelaez Lopez, Research Scholar

CRG Research Scholar, Alan Pelaez Lopez, is an afroindigenous poet, installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, México. Their work attends to the quotidian realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, the Black condition in Latin America, and the intimate kinship units that trans and nonbinary people build in the face of violence. Alan’s debut poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award. They are also the author of the chapbook to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020). Alan Pelaez Lopez coordinates the CRG Arts & Humanities Initiative (AHI). 

Radical Kinship Series

A series curated and hosted by CRG’s Arts and Humanities Initiative Research Scholar, Alán Pelaez Lopez.  

10.11 | 4 – 5:00 PM PDT | Zoom Webinar
The Radical Capacities of Ghosts, Auto-Deportation, and Art
In “The Radical Capacities of Ghosts, Auto-Deportation, and Art,” scholar Dillon Sung (USC) will present “Sounds of Silence,” an essay that meditates on the potential capacities of dwelling, madness, and dwelling in madness as the conditions and methods that have emerged under the threat of state violence for undocumented peoples in the US.  Public scholar and artist César Miguel Rivera Vega Magallón (Mexico Advocacy Fellow at the Rhizome Center for Migrants in the city of Guadalajara) will present an art talk titled, “ Laudes Guadalaxarensis Civitatis,” which explores the moment when the uncertainty and tedium of irregular migration status becomes an existential anguish or a more concrete threat to health and safety, which makes some illegalized migrants turn to taboo fantasies of return as a way to reclaim agency and survive in climates that attempt to crush that agency.

10.28 | 4 – 5:00 PM PDT | Zoom Webinar
The Space Between Body, Spirit, and Migration:  A Poetry Reading and Drag Performance
“The Space Between Body, Spirit, and Migration” considers how poetry and drag performance can inform us about the quotidian experiences of racialized migrants in the United States. Writer Gladys Wangeci Gitau-Damaskos will read and talk about her second book, I’m Not Allowed to Explain (Only Foreshadow & Reminisce), which serves as an attempt to recollect the space between body and spirit when one gives in to life’s journey as a queer Black migrant femme. Drag performer Wo Chan (a.k.a Pearl Harbor) will blend sound art, performance art, and aesthetics of excess to explore a migrant experience through the lens of affect.

Series co-sponsored by the On the Same Page Program, the Multicultural Community Center, the Undocumented Student Program, and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative at UC Berkeley.