About Me

Scholar-Critic-Artist bio:

Alan Pelaez Lopez (they/them) is a Black Zapotec poet, visual artist, and creative nonfiction theorist. They were born in Mexico; La Costa Chica de Oaxaca is their home and political commitment, though, for more than a decade, they have lived in Oakland, California, a place they see as a teacher in migrant struggle and solidarity. In their writing, Pelaez Lopez explores their undocumented border crossing as an unaccompanied minor in relation to other historical crossings: the trans*Atlantic slave trade, the forced migration of Indigenous peoples due to settler colonialism and ecocides, and the persecution of Indigenous genders that refuse normative ideas of man/woman. Their theoretical writing merges poetry with legal archives of migrant detention, incarceration, and criminalization.

Alan Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travel: poems from a fugitive alien and the chapbook to love and mourn in the age of displacement, and the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent. They are recipient of a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Catalyst for Change Fellowship from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, a Writing Freedom Fellow from Haymarket Books, and an artist residency from SAVVY Contemporary- The Laboratory of Form Ideas (Berlin).

As cofounder of Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and the Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project, Pelaez Lopez believes that collective struggle is one of the pillars to liberation and to end the project of settler colonialism in the Americas.

As an Indigenous writer, Pelaez Lopez writes to be in ethical relation to language. And so, Pelaez Lopez writes against vanishment.

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Alan Pelaez Lopez’s cultural criticism appears in The Architectural Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, The Nation, and more.

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THE REST OF THE TEA:

Alan Pelaez Lopez, Ph.D., was born in Mexico and constantly migrated between the state of Mexico, Mexico City, and Oaxaca’s Costa Chica. At five, Pelaez Lopez migrated alone to the United States, undocumented. As a minor, Pelaez Lopez began to make jewelry as a source of income, where they found their passion for art.

In 2010, Pelaez Lopez became artistically, socially, and politically involved in the immigrant rights movement as DREAM Act votes were about to take place. In 2011, after the legislation failed, Pelaez Lopez helped organize an 11-night and 12-day action on the steps of the Massachusetts State House to denounce and testify against the criminalization of immigrants in the state. Later, they took on leadership positions with the Student Immigrant Movement and shortly after, with the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project.

As a young organizer, Pelaez Lopez was mentored by undocumented Black migrants from the Caribbean and South America, which is what led them to develop an unapologetically Black and queer feminist vision for liberation. Through community organizing and strategizing, Pelaez Lopez has facilitated roundtable discussions with U.S. Senators and Representatives; protested detention centers in CA, TX, NY, and MA; and led political and popular education workshops in Washington DC, NY, MA, VT, CA, GA, TX, IL, PA, and CT.

In 2013, Pelaez Lopez was named a recipient of the National Youth Courage Award for their commitment to uplifting the voices of LGBTQIA+ undocumented immigrants in the United States. They accepted the award in New York City and were an honored guest at NYC Pride. In 2014, they moved to Los Angeles to complete a fellowship at the UCLA Labor Center where they launched their first visual storytelling project and have since worked in the field of public and digital narrative(s).

Pelaez Lopez is a former steering committee member and co-founder of both Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and the Black LGBT Migrant Project (BLMP).

They earned a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Pelaez Lopez lives between the San Francisco Bay Area and Mexico City. They are currently undertaking two creative manuscripts (in addition to academic manuscripts): Chambalés, a trilingual choreopoem about AfroIndigenous (Zapotec, Mixtec, and Chatino) children who shape-shift into dragonflies to avoid settler-violence which has received support from the Museum of the African Diaspora, Submittable, and Brown University; and trans*imagination, a theoretical poetry collection that thinks through detention centers, federal prisons, and plantations as geographies invested in sequestering and dominating the imaginations of those deemed ungovernable.

They are also in development for Alien Enemy/ Enemy Friend (co-written with artist and filmmaker Jess X. Snow):

• • Drama/Fantasy/Period | North America | English/Mandarin/Spanish | 90 min

• • In a San Francisco restaurant, the young lives of Grace an undocumented Chinese kitchen worker, and Itzel, a Black server, become irreversibly entwined when they discover they have time-traveling abilities they cannot yet control.