For non-black folk who self-identify as “brown” and insist on the category: what’s your relationship to Black people who are brown? What’s your relationship to non-Black people who are darker than you? What is your relationship to colorism? Just some questions.
Honored that "When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent" has been officially announced and slated for a Dec 12, 2023 release date.
I’m really annoyed at the IG DMs I get from Black Americans who have decided to move to MX who ask me where they should go (in Oaxaca) on the weekends to explore Black Mexican culture. They don’t see that as US passport holders they’re already more protected than Black MXa
If you’re teaching a class on migration, queer, &/or Afro-diasporic studies, consider teaching my book, “Intergalactic Travels,” where I write about my undocumented migration from MX to the US, surviving as a Black Mexican, & queer hope. Free download:
This rhetoric prevents Indigenous futures. Instead of reflecting, learning abt local indigenous struggles & showing up in coalition, people rather invest in the settler fantasy that everyone in Lat Am. is indigenous thus erasing the material realities of diff indigenous struggles
Some of y’all need to realize that tourism is an action that takes a whole lot of work to actually be considered ethical.
It’s weird when people want kinship based on racialization but don’t care about the conditions, history, or nuances of the community they want to meet
If you pay me, I’ll be Latinx from Sept 15 - Oct 15 and in good Latinx fashion, pretend that class is the problem not race and that we are all a united family fighting for the same political futures ✌🏼
Latinx/Hispanic heritage month initiatives, features, & biographical write ups on Afro-Latinx people have lead you to believe that Afro-Latinidad has a singular light-skinned phenotype. Dark-skinned Afro-Latinxs exist & their erasure benefits colorism, eugenics, & blanqueamiento.
Good morning to all except Mexican nationalists.
My essay, “As a Black Oaxacan, I Have No Choice But to Betray Mexican Nationalism” dropped today in
@Refinery29
Hello! My exhibition, "N[eg]ation," opened at Harvard University last week. Please go check it out if in the Cambridge area: 1350 Massachusetts Ave, 2nd Floor (Art's Wing). Thank you to Dr. Thomas Conners who invited me to dream of this moment since last summer.
Teaching “AfroMexican Culture” has been the most rigorous pedagogical task I’ve taken. I have to teach in English and source 60% of my lectures from books, films, audio, and pamphlets in Spanish, then do my own translations, and only assign English-available texts 📖🤕📝😈
So I teach queer and trans studies and an email I sent to a grad student who asked for reading resources where I recommend a chapter in the anthology "Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots" was BLOCKED by the uni server and the way to fix my emails is to erase prohibited words.
Today in class, I couldn’t remember how to say “the patriarchy” in English so I had to say it in Spanish, “el patriarcado,” and my heart felt so soft & held when a choir of students translated for me in class as if in a rehearsed unison 😭😍💓
"Renaissance: A Film demonstrates that Black joy isn’t inherently radical. In fact, without a sense of materiality, Black joy becomes directionless and easy to co-opt by the varied forces of power that are fueled by anti-Blackness." -Angelica Jade Bastién
And I’m often asked if I am the domestic worker, driver, or assistant of whoever non-Black Mexican person I am with in public.
The Black US tourist will then visit my home country and receive a protection that nationals don’t get because of citizenship and tourism colonialism
some of the futures being imagined during this "hispanic +latinx" heritage month are concerning.
instead, we should be asking, "who might we be outside of nationalism, compulsory heterosexuality, & a colonial relationship with spain, portugal, france, the netherlands, & england?"
These folks claim to have been following me but if they truly read my work, they’d understand that the Black Mexican national is treated as the alien within despite recent racial recognition in the constitution
Black towns are being sold on tik tok by Black Americans, which means that the towns will get racial tourism where white, black and non-white non-black folk will show up to feed their racial fantasies of Mexican negros. & the verbiage used also imports US racial terms not MX ones
I am honestly really fed up.
In Mexico, I have been accused of having a falsified mexican passport; I have been asked to get out of a bus to prove that I am Mexican; I have been asked for my papers by armed soldiers as I walk out of an Oxxo (a convenience store)
If you teach Black Studies, Latin Am. + Caribbean Studies, and/or Gender and Sexuality studies, consider "When Language Broke Open," a volume of 45 first-person stories, poems, and essays by Afro-Latinx queer, trans writers.
almost a decade ago, i applied to a phd program after reading a book and looking up where the author studied. fast forward almost a decade later, the author whose work motivated me to go to grad school wrote me (without us ever meeting or conversing) to be on a panel together.
If you teach Black studies, Indigenous studies, &/or poetics, I'd like to plug my book "Intergalactic Travels" which addresses my migration as an unaccompanied minor to the US in relation to Indigenous dispossession & anti-Black violence. Free dowload here:
someone I wanted to work with in grad school said I was too focused on arts and crafts and that I wasn’t a serious scholar.
i hope they know i just had a solo show at Harvard and that i am a tt faculty teaching trans and black studies every day.
I miss tumblr so much. Like, all the critical analysis was easier to follow there than here. What I don’t miss is academics stealing from tumblr cultural producers, getting tenure from stolen tumblr posts & still seeing the tumblr users as not within/at their intellectual level.
3 years ago I started an essay titled “forced migration is a disabling event” while living in a tiny studio in cdmx & getting medical treatment. picking that essay up today with more to say, an added diagnosis, & more questions than answers to excavate in the writing
been working on a children's book for a year and honestly i am working with hands down one of the most tender agents ever. this lil book is gonna be in the world one day. call it an ode to black mexican 7-year-olds learning to attend to their grief via afromexican music
So much of my work as a queer and trans studies faculty member is to unpack the legal history of all the words, cultures, customs, sexualities, gender expressions, etc. that have been prohibited and thus, illegalized.
I wonder how many more emails will be flagged...
Today is the official release date of WHEN LANGUAGE BROKE OPEN, and I’m so excited to witness each contributor be cited, celebrated, and uplifted. This was truly a labor of love that put me in the position of the student with every single piece.
Someone asked me where I am from and I said Mexico and they followed up with “Oh, I spent 2 weeks in the Dominican Republic.” They for sure think DR is inside Mexico 😭😭😭
NEW CLASS PROPOSED:
"We will be theorizing the limitations of U.S. citizenship and its potential to destroy a way of life, cultural intelligibility, and political imagination. Questions that will be considered are: 🧵1/4
Are you a post-doctoral candidate or junior scholars whose research advances the study of Afro-Latinx communities in the U.S.?
Apply to the Miriam Jiménez Román Fellowship at
@LatinxProjNYU
I’m finishing my fellowship year & highly recommend it!!
The Afro-Latin@* Reader Vol 2 (edited by
@DrYoFiggy
,
@BlackCatrachoBK
,
@OmarisZamora
) has a call for abstracts due Aug 18
Submit here:
I'm the section editor of "Poetics & Literary Landscapes." If you have questions about this section my DMs are open.
In the hopes that I can add some better news to the timeline,
@AZpress
sent me the cutest postcards in preparation for the release of WHEN LANGUAGE BROKE OPEN: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent.
"Following a push for change from Race & Resistance Studies Assistant Professor Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez, the former Queer Ethnic Studies minor has a new name: Queer and Trans Ethnic Studies."
the future is trans <3
Academics are so silly. Yeah go get your tenure and promotion to full prof by publishing about artists but how DARE an artist be in the academy.
Hate it here.
yesterday I told my mom I’m not her “son” and that I’m getting laser hair removal. She was like “ok, está bien.” Like girl, I wanted to fight just a little. But, gracias mami ☺️❤️
Everything that's happened with pretendians in the academy isn't shocking per se, it speaks to the settler fantasy of eliminiation and what Holland names as "the erotic life of racism."
Today was the last class of my “Afromexican and Afro-Chicanx Culture” seminar and the cohort of students I have are some of the most generous and curious intellectuals I have had the honor to be in fellowship with.
Being a disabled faculty member is a trip. Example: receiving invitations from my own university or colleagues who know me IRL stating that they’ll try me again when I’m “better.” I don’t think my disability is going to “change.” So say, “we won’t commit to disability justice.”
as someone who used to think my identity was the most important thing in the world. trust me, it's not.
the political futures you work toward and how you treat those in your immediate communities (not identities, GEOGRAPHY) matter more.
Tomorrow, San Francisco: Join the Museum of the African Diaspora in celebrating When Language Broke Open, an anthology centering the work of Black queer & trans writers of Latin American descent. With: Alan Pelaez Lopez, Breena Nuñez, & Franchesca Araújo.
@otroedgargomez
I taught a class on Afro-Latinx lit. Here are some Black Central American writers:
-Quince Duncan
-Melissa Cardoza
-Gaspar Octavio Hernańdez
- Sulma Arzu-Brown
-Mercy Tullis-Bukhari
-Felene M. Cayetano
For those of us who are light-skinned Black latinxs, we need to seriously reconsider opportunities that come to us during latinx/hispanic heritage month and always ask: are there dark-skinned Black Latinxs included in this?
Nothing like being erased from an archive. HATE IT HERE.
" 'LATINIDAD IS CANCELLED.' So begins Renee Hudson’s new book Latinx Revolutionary Horizons: Form and Futurity in the Americas."
An honor to have been in conversation with Salvadoran-Guatemalan-American cartoonist Breena Núñez and Dominican-American poet and theorist Franchesca Araújo at the Museum of the African Diaspora. Pick up a copy of When Language Broke Open:
The Academy of American Poets published my poem "Overalls" today as part of the Poem-a-Day series <3
Thank you
@marcelo_h_
for curating this month's series and patiently waiting for me to send a poem; and
@poetsorg
for publishing this piece!
as a final, I had students submit a speculative fiction poem & a letter to anyone they wanted to address plus 2 pgs of writing that accompanied their pieces. this assignment produced the most theoretical writing I’ve read by students, more than theory-writing courses I’ve taught
The book was a finalist for the International Latino Book Award and I honestly want more undocumented, refugee, and asylee students to read it. If you’re teaching somewhere w/ a big migrant population & want to teach it, I’m happy to zoom in for a class visit & chat with students
My graduate students are amongst the most brilliant people I’ve read.
Just got my second PhD student from a university in Mexico and opening up their writing has me 😭🤓🔬
Was off social media most of the day due to teaching and the amount of people I’ve watched be tourists in MX through the pandemic have too much to say today about colonialism and don’t understand their own participation in tourist colonialism. Send tweet.
Today, a student in my queer and trans* ethnic studies seminar said, "We know necropolitics more than we know care," and I cannot stop thinking about it.
It’s Juneteenth and pride. On the first 19 days of this June I have
-been mugged by 4 men in public
-been told “you’re lucky I talked to you because you can’t even walk” after I rejected a gay man
-been harassed while waiting for accessible bathroom because my cane looks “fake”
We also need to recognize that while we (light-skinned Black Latinxs) may have something to say about colorism, that analysis is limited and most likely learned and informed from dark-skinned Black Latinxs who we must credit and name regularly.
Im between teaching and prepping for seminars, I talked to a friend back home. We processed the disappearance of an AfroMexican 15yr old in Guerrero and weeped at the fact that she was found.
Friends, someone whom I'm in community with works directly with Doña Esther, a Zapotec woman living in Tijuana who is being evicted from her tamalería, La Antigüita, which is a safe haven to migrants crossing north. Please help me in reaching the $5K goal:
I am back in the US, literally just to teach in the Spring, and a part of me is so sad already. I don't miss the nation-state, I miss friends, a doctor who wants me alive, and the comfort of roasted grasshoppers.
6 months of being diagnosed, misdiagnosed, and tested over and over again. My medical leave has been the least thing from restful. Received a sweet call from a case manager that they’d now mitigate with my insurance company.
mail day.
this reminds me of the clay workshops I used to do with community members who were recently released from detention.
dreaming of a future outside of nations.
I co-organized a panel for ASA titled, “Illegal Epistemologies: Undocumented and formerly undocumented scholars discuss theory, methods, & the field of undocuscholarship,” that I was really excited for. I can’t go anymore but hopefully, we’ll have the tech for it to be hybrid.
I’ve been one of those voices recycled across media circuits and when I realized what was happening, I began to say “no” and recommended other people. 1 of 2 things usually happened: I was labeled “hard to work with,” or my recs were taken. Continue to be hard to work with bbs.
This thread shouldn’t exist & it does because light-skinned Black latinxs like me benefit from 1) an approximation to respectability deemed by racial supremacy that we can actually betray but many of us are unwilling to, 2) the criminalization of our dark-skinned kin
Just saw the proof of a theoretical poem that’s coming out in an academic journal and if this is received well, I think I finally found my entry point into academic writing. No more negotiating between my craft and the theory!
Harvard friends,
Valentine's Day is kinda fake so come take my workshop from 9:45 - 11:45am tomorrow in the Smith Center's Art Wing.
We will be workshopping on the side of the gallery with my tombstone installation & we'll collectively plot alternative futures.
Check out my poem, “the afterlife of illegality” in the Dec issue of
@poetrymagazine
“i think about the choreography of captivity; the ensemble of our kinships; the desires for a different world :: improvisation :: transplantation and and and and…”
last week an anti-trans speaker was invited to the campus where I teach
this morning, an anti-trans group is interviewing people as they walk into campus
how is this a livable "intellectual space"?
3 ) and the continual erasure of countries that have been historically de-centered because they are darker-skinned Black countries in Latin America such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Belize, etc.
Non-Cornell academics, please consider signing.
Cornell is literally working with ICE at this point even if ICE wasn’t “called.” The revoking of a student visa is equivalent to the university actively deporting a student worker.
I’m teaching “The radical trans*imagination” next semester. I want to incorporate some sci-fi zines and either self-published or online erotica. Anyone have some faves?
All of the recent events also make me think about the ways in which Latinx and Chicanx studies may also be complicit in the acceptance of pretendians in the academy.
i am mentally depleted but just finished my lesson plan to discuss the "Fat Liberation Manifesto" and "A Black Feminist Statement." i know my students are probably going to teach me as much as i teach them today and i CANNOT wait to see them 😭
“a body is skin wrapped around stories, is tissue filled with veins that the truth runs through, is a box of bones with a voice inside” - Kai Chen Thom
i am tired of hospitals: their coldness, the thin robes, the needles, the questions, the salt crackers, the long drives.
I say this because I remember that in grad school I asked a Chicanx scholar at a conference where their community was from since they ID as Indigenous and I was met with hostility and I was called a blood quantum supremacist.
Who needs a man when you have a well seasoned cast iron, a beautiful Dutch oven, and a spice shop walking distance?
***ok fine, i DONT need one but I WANT one.
taking applications 😭😮💨
I am giving a keynote at Princeton next Thursday, Sept 22 @ 6pm at the Carl A Fields Center centered of an essay-in-progress titled, “at the end of latinidad.” If you’re in NYC / NJ, come through. Open to the public.
not me writing an impromptu lecture about Black feminism in Harriet Jacobs's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself" and how the feminism in her text can also be seen in AfroMexican women's leadership and fight against white supremacy and patriarchy.
I know that invoking Latinx & Chicanx studies in this discussion is not the same b/c right now, the Indigenous communities harmed are inside the U.S. and as a migrant, I want to add a transnational perspective & point to some of the ways other fields make space for pretendians.
The volume offers up three central questions: How do queer and/or trans Black writers of Latin American descent address memory? What are the textures of caring, being cared for, and accepting care as Black queer and/or trans people of Latin American descent?
I really can't believe that the move from X scholar declares as if I am not also a scholar-artist who declared that sentiment. The politics of citation is beyond me. I love Black Indigenous epistemological erasure.