Biography
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. 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.
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. 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, and an artist residency from SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, Germany.
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. As Mixe writer Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil proclaims, “Yakkutëkeetyëp nayte’n ëëts n’ää n’ayuujk ku ëëts ja nmuku’uktëjk xak’ookt, ja nmuku’uk te’ep ëëts ja n’et nnääjxwi’nyët nyëkuwäntutëp tam te’n jënë’n men pat jyatyën. ¿Xë’n ëëts ja n’ää n’ayuujk myëjët myayët ku ëëts ja nmuku’uk ja’y tak’ookt, tak’amont, takjëntëkeety? ¿Xë’n ëëts ja n’ää n’ayuujk myëjët myayët ku ëëts ja n’et ka’t yakjëntsë’ëk?” [They kill our languages when they do not respect our lands, when they sell and concede them, when they murder those that defend them. How are our languages going to flourish when those who speak them are murdered, silenced, or vanish? How is our word going to flourish in a land from which we are stripped?] And so, Pelaez Lopez writes against vanishment.
