Chicana and Chicano Studies

Alan Pelaez Lopez is a scholar-artist whose academic research integrates the fields of African and African diasporic migration, performance contracts, state violence, settler colonialism, and trans*feminist studies. They are the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the International Latino Book Award, to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020), and editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona, 2023). Their debut children’s book, Abuelita’s Music (Spring 2027), is under contract with Levine Querido Editions.

Dr. Pelaez Lopez's migration scholarship is concerned with "Black illegalities," a term they use to describe the social, legal, and cultural methods African and African diasporic peoples are made illegal throughout the Americas and Western Europe. Through their humanities and social science scholarship, Dr. Pelaez Lopez reads moments where illegalized Black migrants refuse to perform within the nonconsensual contracts of debility and submission, western morality, and meritocracy, all which frame the project of the liberal democracy as a geography of opportunity. To do this work, they attend to direct actions inside migrant detention centers, prisons, and domestic and international borders as well as cultural production (literature, visual and performance art, and music) by illegalized Black migrants. Each geography and cultural object researched and analyzed tells a different story about the constellation between debility, empire accumulation, settler futurity, and ethnoracial supremacy.

A scholar-artist in the field of trans* studies, Dr. Pelaez Lopez merges poetics with theories of gender and Indigenous kinship structures to move with, across, and in question of the contemporary field of gender studies. In 2020, they worked with the Black Trans Circles (a project housed at the Transgender Law Center) as a digital storyteller and archival note taker to conserve the conversations between Black trans women and femmes in the South and Midwest regions of the United States. During their tenure at San Francisco State University, they helped transform the "queer ethnic studies" minor into the "queer and trans ethnic studies" minor, cementing a political commitment to trans* studies. In 2022, they received the Miriam Jiménez Román Fellowship at New York University’s The Latinx Project, dedicating their year to the study of Afro-Latinx trans* epistemologies. Dr. Pelaez Lopez is currently working on a manuscript, trans*imagination, which engages the concept of "transgender rights" as a political category manipulated by the Global North to sidestep accountability for targeted state violence against trans*, gender-expansive, two-spirit, and Indigenous peoples (regardless of gender identity). Outside of academia, they are a co-founding member and former steering committee member of both Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement (Familia TQLM) and the Black LGBTQ Migrant Project (BLMP).

Complementing their humanities and social science scholarship, Dr. Pelaez Lopez is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice spans text-based visuality, paper collage, and intervention and social practice art. As an artist, their work challenges conventional narratives of nationalism and the democratic political imagination, and affirms the value of Black Latin America and Antillean archives. Their visual work has been exhibited across the United States, Germany, and Slovenia, and their art has been featured in publications such as HarperCollins’ Somewhere We Are Human and terremoto, one of Mexico’s premier arts magazines.

Recent examples of Dr. Pelaez Lopez’s exhibitions include a solo show at Harvard University’s Art Wing in Winter 2023 and a 2025 artist residency at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, where they also exhibited work. They regularly facilitate collage-making workshops with recycled objects, newspapers, and cut outs of ligaments that build dialogues between disability/ disabled embodiment, diasporic formation, and fine art.

Alongside their creative-scholarly practice, Dr. Pelaez Lopez has served as a poet-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora, an art practitioner fellow at Brown University, and a columnist for Refinery29’s vertical Somos.

Currently, Dr. Pelaez Lopez is a member of the editorial board for Intervenxions at NYU’s The Latinx Project.

Published in Women Studies Quarterly, The Georgia Review, POETRY Magazine, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Refinery29, Teen Vogue, Rewire News Group, Splinter News, Best American Experimental Writing, Autostraddle, and others.

Commentary in The Architectural Review, The Nation, The Root, Black Agenda Report, and others.

Courses taught at UC Davis: 
CHI 50: Intro to Chicana/o/x Culture  
CHI 155: Chicanx and Latinx Theatre
CHI 161: Queer Latinidad
HNR 195: Honors Thesis Project
CHI 198: Afromexican and Afro-Chicanx Culture