UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation is a hybrid critical and creative investigation of decolonial aesthetics composed of 1) a research-based analysis of Latinx poetry and cultural productions, 2) a lyrical meditation on the archive of my parents’ “illegal” immigration to the U.S., and 3) a community-facing manual for decolonial cultural production and public learning. I construct a conceptual framework for understanding how Latinx artists unsettle form and the production and circulation of their art while intervening within a cultural borderland where the West continues to reenact oppressive colonial struggles and ignore the urgent demands of the Capitalocene. I argue that these artists enact a decolonial poetics in their creative practices, allowing them to interrogate, resist, and disconnect from Eurocentric histories, embodiments, and knowledges—revealing other aesthetic, poetic, and epistemic possibilities. I consider how the artists, many of whom also identify as Indigenous and/or Queer, use creative expression to exercise their vitality or power to endure and thrive within coloniality. Building upon the research of borderland scholars Pedro Pablo Gómez-Moreno, Walter Mignolo, Jennifer Ponce de León, Macarena Gómez-Barris, and their exploration of “Decolonial Aesthetics,” my dissertation considers writing in its traditional forms as imperial artifacts deployed by a U.S./Euro-centric cosmovision to undermine aesthetics that do not reflect or sustain the hegemony. The Latinx poetic productions at the center of my dissertation include two contemporary books of poetry (Natalie Diaz’s (b. 1978) Postcolonial Love Poem and Francisco X. Alarcón’s (1954 – 2016) Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation,) an installation and performance by a visual artist (Beatriz Cortez’s (b. 1970) Memory Insertion Capsule), and a literary labor action campaign (The Undocupoets. Although contemporary (1992–2020), my subjects of analysis are entangled with knowledges produced during key historical moments of Latin America’s colonization in 1629 and 1899. By considering these productions together, my dissertation offers a genealogy of Latinx decolonial aesthetics built on politics of care, survival, and rebellion. I also map out these cultural productions across Central and North America (San Salvador, El Salvador; Puebla, Mexico; and the Mojave Desert, California) and utilize Latin American Studies to unveil how Latinx poetic productions reach beyond the textual, invoking orality and other modalities of expression of Indigenous, Queer, and Latinx knowledge.