Frontera Americana: Reclaiming Silenced Histories, Confronting Colonial Legacies, and Theorizing Through Nepantla

Session will present: On location

This panel brings together five artists working in and around the Southwest borderlands whose practices challenge dominant narratives of culture, identity, labor, and belonging. United by a shared geography but diverse in their approaches, these artists use their work to intervene in histories, deconstruct imposed boundaries, and imagine liberatory futures.

Gina Gwen Palacios presents To All Whom It May Concern, a research-based series investigating historical patents designed for farmworkers in Texas. These works critique techno-capitalism and racialized labor systems through the visual language of invention. Corinne McCormack-Whittemore explores the psychological and cultural complexities of closed adoption and borderland identity through Nuestra Lengua, evoking Anzaldúan nepantla as both theme and methodology. Paul Valadez’s performance-based work, Giving Away Mexican Food, documents a socially engaged act of cultural exchange, identity assertion, and humility through ephemeral drawings distributed at the The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture. Dr. Christen S. García presents Tortillando, a series of dyed tortillas burned and pressed into pedagogical and healing objects, informed by nepantla aesthetics, autohistoria-teoría, and curadora theory. Angel Cabrales introduces The Uncolonized: Axihuical, a speculative, multimedia reimagining of a decolonized Mesoamerican future, fusing sci-fi with indigenous histories and technological imagination.

Together, these artists illuminate the borderlands not as periphery but as center—sites of resistance, transformation, and radical vision. This panel invites dialogue on how art from la frontera challenges colonial legacies, reclaims silenced histories, and constructs empowering futures from the margins.


Keywords:
Geographic Area: North America
Time Period: Twenty-First Century
Topics: Latinx
Topics: Art Practice
Borderlands

Chair:
Gina Gwen Palacios, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

Frontera Regionalism
Gina Gwen Palacios, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Nuestra Lengua/Our Language: From an Art and Design Perspective
Elizabeth McCormack-Whittemore, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
American Lived Experiences of Liminality: Artists Acts of Nepantla, Autohistoria-teoría, and Curadora
Dr. Christen Garcia, MFA, PhD, Department of Art Education / Florida State University
The Uncolonized: Axihuical
Angel Cabrales, University of Texas at El Paso
Abstract Submissions Closed