Alan Pelaez Lopez (unknown – current) is a scholar of migration, poetics, and settler colonialism, and an interdisciplinary artist.
Biography.
Alan Pelaez Lopez was born in Mexico and migrated to the United States when they were five years old. 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. 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. Their chapbook, "to love and mourn in the age of displacement" was published by Nomadic Press in 2020. As a cultural critic, Pelaez Lopez wrote the foreword to "Fantasy America," the exhibition catalogue to "Fantasy America," on view at The Andy Warhol Museum in 2021, which responded to Andy Warhol's 1985 photographic memoir "America." They have published cultural commentary about film, music, and/or social movements in Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Splinter News, Rewire News Group, and more.
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.
As a social practice artist, they initiated the hashtag #latinidadiscancelled, which gained traction in 2018. Through the hashtag, Pelaez Lopez began to compose memes that sparked critical conversation about Anti-blackness and Indigenous erasure in discourse surrounding Latinx identity. Their solo exhibition "N[eg]ation" was on view at Harvard University in 2023, which further extended the artist's critiques of nationalism, race, ethnicity, and Indigeneity in Latin America and the Latin American diaspora via a series of installations.
After completing a PhD in Ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley, Pelaez Lopez began their academic career at San Francisco State University as Assistant Professor of Race and Resistance Studies where they pushed to change the Queer Ethnic Studies program to the "Queer and Trans Ethnic Studies" program, centering transgender studies.
Bibliography.
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