OVERSEAS UNDERCURRENTS
My thesis project OVERSEAS UNDERCURRENTS is a hybrid poetic text that explores movement, family and environment through a decolonial, ecopoetic and historical materialist lens. The project investigates Caribbean migration specifically, the journey from Havana, Cuba to Miami, Florida that many, including the author’s family have undertaken. Inspired by critical and creative writers like Édouard Glissant, Jose Quiroga and Legna Rodriguez Iglesias, the project explores how exile and displacement can be lived as a palimpsestic present, making home in a city marked by adaptation and transculturation. While reconciling loss of the initial culture and homeland, how does a community respond to ongoing silence, political estrangement and mythic fantasy of a place that becomes stuck in time and memory? Interlacing my family’s story and my own work with mutual aid and labor organizing within larger sociopolitical contexts, I suggest that while there is no clear answer to a sense of rootlessness, there is grounding in community and coalition-building.
OVERSEAS UNDERCURRENTS incorporates poetry, prose, images, monologue scripts, and various communication technologies to bridge the gap between a distancing silence and lived experiences of proximity and performance space. Rejecting violence of monolingual intent, the project shuttles between English and Spanish in a constantly shifting linguistic landscape that emulates the experience of being awash in language. While there is a sense of loss—of homeland prompting an extended exile, of neighborhoods and culture due to gentrification and dereliction, and the impending material loss as a result of worsening climate disasters—the text finds clarity through its belief in future liberation.
DREAM(E)SCAPE
Inspired by Edgar Garcia’s Skins of Columbus, this chapbook collection recounts details of nightly dreams inculcated by border/crossing and queer desire. In this strange and hallucinatory text, dreams are not nonsense, but omnisense, a form of knowing that operates beyond the recognizable senses and states of consciousness.
UC-CUBA Grant Recipient
Part of the OVERSEAS UNDERCURRENTS manuscript is a portion titled “Cuba Travel Log: oramos por una conexión fuerte,” inspired by my 2022 trip to the island to visit my family. I want to continue developing this type of travel writing, undoing the violence of extraction, tourism, and what Diana Taylor calls percepticide or, intentionally turning away from sights/realities of violence in an attempt to “un-see” or not acknowledge it. I have secured grant funding from the UC-CUBA Academic Initiative to return to Cuba to develop and expand this literary arts project, while forging creative connections with other artists on the island.
11:11 Collective
With professors Nadia Villafuerte, Amy Sara Carroll, Lorena Mostajo and Ph.D. student Ana Villalpando of UC San Diego, I am part of the 11:11 Collective. We secured grant funding from the UC Reimagining Refuge Network to develop a day-long series of arts- and activism-focused workshops in Tijuana, BC. We will be working with contacts at the UCSD-Alacrán Community Station to host the event at this vital community shelter.