Dr. Alan Pelaez Lopez (AfroZapotec) is a scholar, creative writer, cultural critic, and visual artist from Oaxaca, México.
They have two academic projects. One that attends to the quotidian realities of undocumented Black migrants in the United States, and how they respond to local and global Black resistance movements while surviving their illegalization; and a second project on AfroMexican contemporary visual culture, a study that reads cartoon strips, ceramic objects, photographs, performances, murals, film and television, collages, and ephemera primarily in Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Edomex.
Dr. Pelaez Lopez’s debut visual poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award. They are also the author of the chapbook to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020), and the editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona Press, 2023).
In their collages, installations, and intervention art, they excavate erased histories of African and African diasporic resistance in Latin America, massacres and disappearances of Indigenous communities in Mexico and Central America, and alternative futures where Black Latin Americans live with ease, abundance, and rest.
Alan’s cultural criticism appears in The Architectural Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, The Nation, and more.
His forthcoming book is ABUELITA’S MUSIC (Levine Querido).
