Surviving Illegality; Imagining Otherwise 

The session returns to the reading and salon by poet and transdisciplinary artist Alan Pelaez Lopez, held earlier this year during their residence within our project STANDING IN THE CRACKS OF MULTIPLE HISTORIES.

At the age of five, Alan crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and lived as an undocumented immigrant for nearly two decades. The reading featured published and unpublished pieces exploring migration, surveillance, queer intimacy, and the resistance of hegemonic, imperialist, and fascist regimes. It invited audiences to become a witness to the everyday textures of someone who is Black, Zapotec, and queer. The salon opened conversations where those present gather as a temporally bound community to reflect on what it might mean to "imagine otherwise", as we survive political violence, and if, such imagination is possible in the absence of a collective. 

The session closes with a selection of songs chosen by Alan, extending stories and movements in resonance –from Mabiland's meditation on Black resistance in Colombia, invoking George Floyd as emblematic of every Black person in Latin America, to Mare Advertencia Lirika's Zapotec feminist anthem; from Ana Tijoux and Shadia Mansour's on settler colonialism in Latin America, continental Africa, and occupied Palestine to Saint Levant's on displacement from Gaza and Algiers, in search of home and pleasure in diaspora; and Villano Antillano's chronicle of trans life in the U.S. and across the Americas.  

The mix was edited by Ola Zielińska.

Alan Pelaez Lopez, born 1993 in Mexico, is a transdisciplinary artist and writer whose work addresses the legal conditions of forced migration and land dispossession in North America. Pelaez Lopez has recently exhibited collages, installations, and intervention art at Harvard University’s Art Wing, Galerija Škuc, EFA Project Space, and in public spaces. They are a recipient of a Brown University Art Practitioner Fellowship, a Museum of the African Diaspora poet-in-residence position, and a New York University Miriam Jiménez Román fellowship.