Alan Pelaez Lopez (born 1993) is an AfroZapotec artist-scholar of migration, poetics, and settler colonialism, and an interdisciplinary artist that is involved in creative writing, cultural critic, and visual art.[1][2][3]
Alan Pelaez Lopez, Ph.D., was born in Mexico in 1993.[2][4] They spent their early years migrating between the state of Mexico, Mexico City, and Oaxaca's Costa Chica.[4] In 1998, at the age of five, Pelaez Lopez migrated to the United States alone as an undocumented minor.[4] At the age of eight or nine, they stated their interest in becoming a poet heightened.[5]
Academic achievements
Later in 2010, during the DREAM Act votes, Pelaez Lopez became involved in immigrant rights work through artistic, social, and political organizing.[1][4] After the DREAM Act Legislation failed in 2011, they helped organize an 11-nights and 12-day action on the steps of the Massachusetts State House to protest and provide testimony regarding immigration policies in the United States.[1][4] Later, they held leadership roles with the Student Immigrant Movement and later they became involved with the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project.[1][4] Mentored by undocumented Black migrants from the Caribbean and South America as a young organizer led them to developed a feminist vision for the liberation of Black and Queer individuals.[1][4] Pelaez Lopez was able to attend meetings with U.S. Senators and Representatives through community organizing and strategizing.[1][4] They also protested detention centers in CA, TX, NY, and MA. They also led political education workshops in Washington DC, NY, MA, VT, CA, GA, TX, IL, PA, and CT.[1][4]
In 2013, after receiving the National Youth Courage Award in New York City for their work uplifting the voices of LGBTQIA+ undocumented immigrant, Pelaez Lopez moved to Los Angeles to complete a fellowship at the UCLA Labor Center.[1][4] While working there, they launched their visual storytelling project and continued working within public and digital narratives in 2014.[1][4]
Alan Pelaez Lopez was also a former steering committee member and co-founder of Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and the Black LGBT Migrant Project (BLMP).[6][3][1][4]
Pelaez Lopez's first poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien was published in 2020 by The Operating System, and was a finalist for the International Latino Book Award.[8] In the collection, the author chronicles their migration via the use of poems, collages, performance documentation, and political asylum application forms to emphasize the material realities of Indigenous and Black immigrants.[9] Their chapbook, to love and mourn in the age of displacement was published by Nomadic Press in 2020.[6][3][2] In 2022, Pelaez Lopez was one of five recipients of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation alongside Tarik Dobbs, Diamond Forde, Tariq Luthun, and Troy Osaki.[10]
As a social practice artist, they initiated the hashtag #latinidadiscancelled on Instagram, which gained traction in 2018.[19] Through the hashtag, Pelaez Lopez began to compose memes that sparked critical conversation about Anti-blackness and Indigenous erasure in discourse surrounding Latinx identity.[20][19][21] Not long after, they posted a post with a red background and a simple white font stating: "Latinidad is Cancelled".[22][19]
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