“Space is the place” - Sun Ra
Over the past 12 years, I've collaborated with communities to create, transform, and reclaim space - as a cultural organizer, language worker, and socially engaged artist. My interdisciplinary practice explores the alchemy of food, language, memory, and other forms of life-making as a way to prefigure and actualize collective healing, justice, and liberation. I currently experiment with poetry and performance, soundscape narrative, and placemaking as part of my practice.
In 2020, I co-founded Tecolotl, an immigrant, queer, trans, and poc-led consulting collective that specializes in building multilingual capacity and facilitating community-led planning and design processes. My work with Tecolotl is an extension of my artistic practice and fuses my extensive experience leading organizing and advocacy campaigns with my commitment to language justice and popular education frameworks to co-create innovative, multilingual urban design and placemaking interventions.
curious?
I’d love to share more about my vision and work and discuss our potential collaboration.
“To have memory is to have hope” - Pancho Argüelles
I am a 2023 Stove Works Artist-in-Residence and a 2020 UH-KGMCA-Project Row Houses Art & Social Engagement Fellow.
My collaborative experiments with language and space - including performance, poetry, and translation - have been featured in Houston Eyes, Silver Screens (2020), Defunkt Magazine (2020), El Zócalo at the Alley Theater (2019), and Border Tuner at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts - UTEP (2019), among others.
I am currently collaborating on Notas Jotas, a collective bilingual community intervention, online archive, and future publication uplifting the cultural power of LGBTQ+ Latinx voices, through a grant from The Idea Fund. I am also working on a series of poetry chapbooks inspired by my experiences organizing alongside immigrant workers in Houston and Los Angeles.
a bit about me
I’m originally from a small, rural town in Guanajuato, Mexico and migrated with my family to the U.S. when I was 9 years old. I grew up in a working class household in the city of Houston, where I graduated high school, college, and began organizing alongside immigrant workers to transform our workplaces, communities, and the city at large.