Alan Pelaez Lopez is a cultural critic, visual artist, and academic from Oaxaca’s Costa Chica invested in Black Indigenous futures and the end of borders. They are a co-founder of the Black LGBTQ Migrant Project and Familia: Trans, Queer Liberation Movement, where they have worked with undocumented trans migrants surviving detention and solitary confinement; supporting reentry after deportation campaigns; and amplifying the role of cultural work in social movements. Alan’s debut visual 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), and the editor of “When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent” (University of Arizona Press, 2023).
In their collages, installations, and intervention art, they excavate erased histories of African and African diasporic resistance in Latin America, massacres and disappearances of Indigenous communities in Mexico and Central America, and alternative futures where Black Latin Americans live with ease, abundance, and rest. Their most recent art project, “Disabling Acts,” merges collages, installations, and soundscapes to tell stories about the intersection of forced migration, disability, and Black life.
Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis. They live in Oakland, CA.
Artist Statement: “Disabling Acts” is a social practice project I began in 2018, first taking shape through clay-sculpting and creative writing workshops with undocumented migrants. Over time, my own access needs have changed: I now use a cane or power wheelchair full-time and often can’t move three fingers on my right hand. These shifts have made sculpting and writing more difficult, and they’ve also deepened my understanding of how the body shapes creative work. In 2022, I began a poetry manuscript exploring how the United States pressures migrants to perform submission through coerced labor practices and the ambient fear produced by raids, detention, and family separation. I refer to these state-driven mechanisms as “disabling acts,” which I define as forces that inflict physical, emotional, and psychological terror on migrant bodies, leading to illness and, in the most extreme cases, death.
I am now expanding “Disabling Acts” into a sound installation that will gather and share conversations with Afro-Latine migrant communities, focusing on their experiences with migration and dis/ability. The C4C grant will help bring this next phase to life, transforming the project into an accessible, immersive art space that centers disability justice as a pillar of migrant justice and Black liberation because not all community organizing happens through policy or reform, some happens through art.”