Beyond the Wall: Fronteriza and Feminist Imaginaries

Michelle Tellez
Dr. Michelle Téllez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona. Her public and academic scholarship focuses on transnational community formations, mothering, and gendered migration along the U.S./Mexico border. She has a long history in grassroots organizing projects, digital media and community-based arts and performance. She co-edited The Chicana M(other)work Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolución, published in March of 2019 and is the author of Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect published in September 2021. In 2022, she and her Co-PIs were awarded two Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative Grants for new work on Afro-Chicanx communities and Mexican/Chicana activists in the borderlands.

This talk offers an alternative mapping and framing of the U.S./Mexico border through the documentation and analysis of feminist projects in the borderlands. I use these examples to ask how we can imagine the borderlands as a space of feminist resistance, conviviality, agency, and creative community building, one that differs from the rhetoric of invasion, crime, insecurity, violence and illegality that is popularized in the media.

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Intercollegiate Department of Chicanx Latinx Studies