I conduct critical and creative research that explores the work of contemporary Latinx poets and artists who use multimodal decolonial poetics to unsettle western forms and illuminate the complexities of life within coloniality.
Selected Research
Conference Papers & Presentations
“Latina/o/x Narratives: Including Diverse Experiences from Our Community,” 2024 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, Feb. 2024.
“¡Viva Las Deslenguadas! Unsettling Colonial Translation in Francisco X. Alarcón’s Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (1992).,” Translation as Defiance, American Comparative Literature Association, February 2024.
“Journey to Futures Owed: Reclaiming Home through Decolonial Performance, Space, and Lyric in Beatriz Cortez’s Memory Insertion Capsule (2017).” Laboratorio de mundos: Futuros, rupturas, posibilidades, Departamento de Estudios Hispánicos, Brown University, April 2023.
Doctoral Dissertation Summary
“Borderland Vitality: Unsettling Form through Decolonial Poetics” is a hybrid critical and creative investigation of decolonial aesthetics composed of 1) a research-based analysis of Latinx poetry and cultural productions, 2) a lyrical meditation on the archive of my parents’ migration to the U.S., and 3) a community-facing manual for decolonial cultural production and public learning. I construct a conceptual framework for understanding how Latinx artists unsettle form and the production and circulation of their art while intervening within a cultural borderland where the West continues to reenact oppressive colonial struggles and ignore the urgent demands of the Capitalocene. I argue that these artists enact a decolonial poetics in their creative practices, allowing them to interrogate, resist, and disconnect from Eurocentric histories, embodiments, and knowledges—revealing other aesthetic, poetic, and epistemic possibilities. I consider how the artists, many of whom also identify as Indigenous and/or Queer, use creative expression to exercise their vitality or power to endure and thrive within coloniality. Read more here.