Alán Peláez López Performance Review
Alán Peláez López’s poetry collection “Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien” details the experience of being an Afro-indigenous queer undocumented individual in the United States. Through personal photos, verse, maps, drawings, and augmented documents López details the continuous trauma of being undocumented in the US.
As a lifelong artist López has spent their life conceptualizing their traumatic experiences through artistic expression, “Interngalatic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien,” is a chronological collection of poems based on Lòpez immigration experience. Starting from their trip over the border by themselves at the age of five, López starts from their reflection on what it means to be Afro-indigenous in a post imperial world and ends with the reaction to Trumps hateful anti-immigrant language. Throughout their book López reacts to their lifelong trauma from experiencing alienation due to their marginalized identity.
Before engaging with López's poems, I was not overly familiar with the genre at all, nor was I familiar with poetry as a form of activism. Though I have read poetry in the storytelling capacity before I was not experienced with it in an “educational setting.” I was more familiar with some of the struggles of undocumented individuals, but I was unfamiliar with the marginalization Lòpez specifically details. As a member of multiple marginalized groups, they have a unique blended identity that is a remnant of attempted genocide. My prior knowledge that informed my reading is based of mostly secondary historical, and sociological academic sources on Atlantic history and Neo-colonialism. I have not read many primary sources or personal accounts in these areas, but I did find that my prior knowledge did help me come to a more critical understanding of López's writing.
I specifically drew on my knowledge of the experience of the formerly enslaved in Latin America, specifically North America. Under the Spanish the Casta system, Black citizens occupied the lowest rank on account of the inability of them to ever be able to ‘erase’ their Blackness. Indigenous people were ranked slightly above because of their connection and knowledge of the land. But were no less robbed of their sovereignty, to put it lightly. But their spots in the lower Casta's made Afro-indigenous marriages more common (Schwaller, 423-44). This concept of race informed my understanding of the first couple poems of Lòpez's book.
On page 8 Lòpez writes,
“& to think that once, I thought we were lucky
to trace the maps of our names to sailors and warriors.
where you found an archive of extraordinary stories,
we found our ancestors kidnapped, transported & enslaved.
where you found romantic cities,
we found occupation, plantations and water pollution.
where you found mestizaje,
we found an attempt at total elimination.”
As a moment in the beginning of the book, López is starting with their Afro-indigenous identity. As a personal narrative, this section transcends time as a survivor of an ancestor of enslavement, and multi-faceted attempt at extermination. As referenced above an Afro-indigenous person experiences a different kind of marginalization since their ancestors were enslaved and removed from their ancestral homes as Africans and as Indigenous peoples. The last two lines, I analyzed using the concepts from the paragraph above. The inter-marriages between Spainards, Indigenous, and the formerly enslaved were encouraged to turn Indigenous and formerly enslaved as Spanish or as white as they could. Therefore, it was used as another attempt at extermination. López uses these first couple pages to establish their identity because it is the preface for the pain they face as an undocumented individual in a neo-colonial world as a person who still has no home. Furthermore, is a person whose existence is “illegal” despite the fact that their ancestor's movement was against their will. Therefore, the maintenance and enforcement of the border, the same processes of extermination are being reproduced. The lack of regard for Afro-indigenous people is evident by the fact that, consistently there is nowhere for them to go.
López not only struggles with being Afro-indigenous in Mexico, and is not only illegal in the U.S., López learns what it means to be Black and queer in the U.S. In the middle of López’s book they talk about how people like them are constantly experiencing death and violence due to their race and status. After they crossed the border, they were not only undocumented, Afro-indigenous, but also now Black and queer in America. López writes about this as they reflect that even if they were documented, they would still be Black in America and could be killed at any time. They are also still queer, which comes with more alienation. Despite being documented after experiencing such a traumatic journey, there are still moments when they still don’t feel documented.
On page 94 López explains,
“to survive fugitivity is to experiment with everyday forms of escape. to survive fugitivity is to hold joy, grief, anger, and pleasure all within the same hour. it’s not romantic. escape(/ing) tends to hurt, and more often than not, escape(/ing) is unrecognizable. to survive fugitivity is to lean on that which punctures the body, fragmenting the idea that the body is ours, which is to say, to survive fugitivity is to experiment with the (re)making, (re)shaping, and (re) imagining of our bodies each day. ain’t that intergalactic?”
At the end of their book López recounts that to survive to constantly go through a process of remaking, reshaping and reimagining themselves in order to survive. Poetry is the way that López reimagines, how they memorialize their experiences and reimagine their identity and story.
My experience of reading “Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien,” has been different than any other experience I have had in my other global studies classes. In “Digital Resources: The Humanizing of Deportation Archive,” by Robert Irwin, Irwin details his experiences in creating an achieve of digital stories of personal accounts of deportation. Like Lòpez’s book, it is a project that is individualized. Like López these personal accounts are ways to reshape and reclaim the notion of illegality, and provide active accounts of how borders and deportation are shaped by false notions neo-colonialism. My previous studies provided some background knowledge but works like these were the application of this knowledge, and in a sense is an actual practice in disseminating the political and social realities I have learned about in my academic reading
Peláez Lopez, Alán. Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien. The Operating System, 2020. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,url,uid&db=cat01476a&AN=umdbc.006258426&site=eds-live&scope=site.EBSCOhost, accessed April 17, 2023.
Irwin, Robert. 2020. “Digital Resources: The Humanizing Deportation Archive.” Global Migration Center. UC Davis.
Schwaller, Robert C., and Matthew P. Bowman. 2021. “Capturing the Quotidian: Casta Paintings and Demographic Trends in Late Colonial Mexico.” Colonial Latin American Review 30 (3): 423–44. doi:10.1080/10609164.2021.1947048.
(this source I read in a previous class)