Alan Pelaez Lopez gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2023, part of the Spring 2023 Flash Reading Series.
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, which is 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.
At the moment, Pelaez Lopez lives between the San Francisco Bay Area and Mexico City. They are currently undertaking two 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.