The panel will begin with “Resisting the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall: Mirroring in Activism by Chicanx and Latin American Artists” by Laura Elena Belmonte. She argues that the U.S-Mexico Border is a place of liminality that represents the experience of Chicanas and Chicanos. Drawing connections from Gloria Anzaldúa and Guillermo Gómez Peña’s theorizations of the border, Belmonte analyzes video installations from Chicanx artists such as Ana Teresa Fernández and Marcos Ramírez to explore the “experience of mirroring,” that is “a reflection of oneself that can be distorted, disrupted, but can also be a true reflection of oneself.” This paper will discuss how the Coatlicue State and the Möbius Strip, concepts that depict the contradiction of the reflection of the self as a person of Mexican descent, is represented in these artworks.

Roxana Ariadne Curiel in "Illegible Lives: Blackness, Indigeneity, and Femme Bodies in Mexico" looks at blackness within Mexico’s dominant national imaginaries together with discourses of mestizaje and indigeneity in Latin America through the work of Alán Peláez López. Peláez López is an Afro-Indigenous activist and artist from the coastal Zapotec community of Oaxaca, Mexico, whose work explores blackness, citizenship, grief, gender, migration, and indigeneity within discourses of mexicanidad and latinidad. Curiel places the artist’s interventions vis-à-vis cultural productions that portray stereotypes of Black and Indigenous people in Mexico while establishing the mestizo—an imagined indigenous-Spanish subject—as the organizing symbol of the Mexican national identity and masculinity. Curiel proposes understanding mexicanidad as a language that creates the illegibility of blackness, the disposability of femme life, and the appropriation of indigenous cultures at the expense of their rights.

In the third paper, “Unpacking the Female Gaze: Race, Gender and Cinematic Representation in La Sirena by Christen Celaya and Piel Canela by Michel Saucedo,” Lori Celaya examines how two short independent films produced and directed by Latinas defy stereotypes around sex work and gender through the lens of an exotic dancer in Los Angeles and a jinetera (sex worker)/medical student in Havana. The plot in these two films focuses on intersectional themes of identity, trauma and loss. The intimate staging reflected in these mise en scène center on a Latina agency that disrupts ideas of femininity within hetero-patriarchal cultural norms in the twenty-first century.

The last paper presented by Gisabel Leonardo, “Dios, (Doña) Patria, Libertad: Black, Femme Resistance in Evaristo Angurria’s Doña Patria Murals,” offers a radical reading of the figure of Doña Patria in the work of Dominican muralist Evaristo Angurria. Leonardo takes into consideration both the various reproductions of Angurria’s Doña Patria, a Black, Dominican woman, and the racial, gendered, and classed implications of her image that trouble the very notion of “patria” (homeland). Her paper reads Angurria’s work as a force of resistance through an undeniably Black, femme, and campesina aesthetic that must be recovered from the grasps of a white, elite, national narrative. Leonardo engages with Black feminist theory and reading through a minoritarian aesthetic of opacity that, as Christina León notes, “conjures and resists the visual registers that so often form the contours of our political landscape,” in this case Doña Patria as an avatar of resistance in the Dominican Republic.