Somewhere We Are Human - Contributors

Bo Thai , or Boonyarit Daraphant, is an undocumented artist. His work ranges

from writing to visual arts to clothing design. Without DACA and therapy, he initially got into art as a form of healing and as a part of his hustle to create

two clothing lines: illegal Drip and BoThai. His hope is to use art to hold vulnerable spaces for himself and others. He often freestyles his streams of thought and later refines them for larger audiences. His creative inspiration

comes from his culture and experience in Thailand, anime, surrealism, and

other mediums.

Francisco Aviles Pino is an undocumented queer writer and producer based in Los Angeles, California, whose work focuses on incarceration, migration, and culture. They have published multimedia content for the ACLU, The Intercept, Vogue, OC Weekly, and Brave New Films and have consulted for winning political campaigns and candidates. Aviles Pino is an alum of the Macondo Writers Workshop, the NALAC Leadership Institute, the Poetry Foundation's Emerging Writers Fellowship, and the NCCEP-GUALA Reach Higher Initiative during the Obama Administration. They worked as a Staff

Community Organizer for the Orange County Congregation Community for five years, where they supported numerous local and statewide campaigns and organized several intergenerational coalitions. Born in Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico, and raised in Los Angeles and Anaheim, Francisco is an artist who is always thinking and working through the intersections and conflicts between history, documentary, theater, participatory research, poetry, and public policy.

féi hernandez (they/them) was born in Chihuahua, México, and raised in Inglewood, California. They are a trans nonbinary visual artist, writer, and healer. fei is the author of Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications, 2020). Their writing has been featured in Poetry; Oxford Review of Books; Frontier; NPR's "Code Switch"; Immigrant Report; Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (Columbia University Press, 2019); Hayden's Ferry Review; The BreakBeat Poets, Volume 4: LatiNext; and PANK Magazine; among others. fei is a spiritualist who utilizes a decolonial approach to ancestral energetic healing for

(IG1) BIPOC. They collect Pokémon plushies. fei is the president of Gender Justice LA and is a cofounder of the ING Fellowship.

Alan Pelaez Lopez is an Afrolndigenous poet, installation, and adornment artist from the coastal Zapotec community of Oaxaca, México. Their work is invested in thinking with and through experiences of fugitivity, the failure of language, grief, ancestral memories, and the role of storytelling in migrant households. Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, and to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020). They have been organizing with undocumented migrants since 2011, including cofounding Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and the Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project.

Danyeli Rodriguez Del Orbe is a Dominican, Bronx-raised community organizer, writer, and spoken word performer. Her work raises awareness, around issues of race, gender, and migration. She has been featured by the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of the African Diaspora, People en Español magazine, and others. In December 2019, she self-published her first collection of poetry, periódicos de ayer, a lover's archive. Danyeli is also the cofounder and cohost of loose accents, a Latinx podcast that highlights the immigrant experiences of the East and West coasts. In addition to performing, Danyeli has been an avid advocate for immigrant rights, receiving the New York State Dream Activist Award and being a recipient of an Immigrant Justice Corps Justice Fellowship and a New York Immigration Coalition DREAM Fellowship.

Julio Salgado is a visual artist who happens to be undocumented and queer. Being undocumented and queer has fueled the contents of his visual art, which depicts key individuals and moments of the DREAM Act and the migrant rights movement. Undocumented students, organizers, and allies across the country have used Salgado's artwork to call attention to the migrant rights movement. Salgado is the co-creator of the Disruptors Fellowship, an inaugural fellowship from the Center for Cultural Power for emerging television writers of color who identify as trans and/or nonbinary, disabled, or undocumented/formerly undocumented immigrants. His work has been displayed at the Oakland Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian.

Photo by Jesús Iñiguez

Rommy Torrico is a formerly undocumented, queer, trans/nonbinary visual artist born in Iquique, Chile; raised in Naples, Florida; and currently based out of New York City. They have been involved in the (im)migrant rights struggle for several years and infuse much of their work with personal experience and the stories their community shares, Over the years, Torrico's work has been included in several publications and exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the Americas and internationally.

Sól Casique is an undocumented creative, centering their work on themes of transformation and the beauty of being, creating and imagining beyond the limits of colonialism, As a stellium Taurus, they re constantly craving birria tacos, a warm window seat to read by, a sweaty perreo mix, and the fall of white supremacist states. There's no negotiation for their identity.

Carolina Rivera Escamilla is an educator, writer, poet, and filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles, California. Born in El Salvador and educated in theater arts, she went into exile in the 1980's. Her writing has been published, among other places, in Analecta Literary and Arts Journal (University of Texas, Austin), Hostos Review/Revista Hostosiana (Latin AMerican Writers Institute, CUNY), The Strange Cargo: An Emerging Voices Anthology 1997-2010 (PEN Center), and Collateral Damage: Women Write About War (University of Virginia Press). Her book of short stories, entitled...after..., was published in 2015. A fellow of the PEN American/Emerging Voices program, Rivera Escamilla was also the director of the documentary film Manlio Argueta, Poets and Volcanoes. She earned her bachelor of arts degree in English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, with an emphasis in creative writing and Spanish literature.

Julissa Arce is a Mexican and American writer and activist. She is the nationally bestselling author of My (Underground) American Dream and Someone like Me. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, TIME magazine, Vogue, and other outlets. Her most recent book, You Sound like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation (Flatiron, 2022), is a manifesto against the ways America demands assimilation yet denies belonging, and a rallying cry to create space to truly be ourselves. Julissa immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico at the age of eleven and was undocumented for almost fifteen years. She became an American citizen in August 2014. Before becoming an author, she built a successful career on Wall Street. She was named one of the 25 Most Powerful Women of 2017 by People en Español and 2018's Woman of the Year

by the City of Los Angeles. Julissa lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two cats.

Dulce Guerra was born in Obregon, Sonora, México. In July 2000, at the age of eight, she migrated from Huatabampo, Sonora, to Fair Oaks, Indiana, In June 2012, she married and moved to Los Angeles, California. She currently lives in Palmdale, California, with her husband, Cordero Guerra, their two children, Alora and Benicio, her mother-in-law, and three pets, She graduated from California State University-Northridge in the summer of 2020 with a bachelor of arts degree in Spanish language and culture. She is currently continuing her education at SUN as a graduate student in the Spanish

master's program. She hopes to become a Spanish professor in the future.

Lucy Rodriguez-Hanley is a creative nonfiction writer, filmmaker, and mother of two. A Dominicana from Washington Heights, she is now living in Long Beach, California. Her memoir-in-progress explores the effects that migration, assimilation, and maternal rage have on the narrator's life. She is a strong advocate for representation of women and BIPOC in creative spaces. She is the chapter liaison for Women Who Submit and is cofounder of the Long Beach Literary Arts Center where she co-leads the Long Beach chapter of Women Who Submit.

Barbara Sostaita

Dr. Rita Urquijo-Ruiz

Aline Mello

Oscar Vazquez

Jennif(f)er Tamayo

is a performer, poet, and scholar whose writing and stage work reimagine narratives about and politics of queer, undocumented figures in the U.S. She is the author of the poetry collection [Red Missed Aches, Read Mistakes, Read Missed Aches] (2011) and YOU DA ONE (2017), and her latest prose-poem publications to kill the future in the present (2018). JT has received fellowships from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, the Arts Research Center, The Hemispheric Institute, and CantoMundo. Her work has been staged at the Brooklyn Museum, BAMFA (Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive), Midtown Arts & Theater Center Houston, and La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, among other. Currently, JT lives and works on Ohlone and Patwin lands and is a Ph.D candidate in performance studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores how contemporary Black and Indigenous poets use vocal and sonic practices to counternarrate histories of colonial violence.

Miriam Alarcon Avila

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