TENDER R/AGE :: RABIA TIERNA

This pop-up sensorium is a collaboration between Latino Studies at UT Austin, artist Adela C. Licona, Nepantla, USA, and local migrant justice organization, Grassroots Leadership. 

TENDER R/AGE :: RABIA TIERNA is an interventionist art project that participates visually, textually, and sonically in the collective outcry against the forced separation of migrant and refugee children from their families at the US/Mexico border. Forced separation is not a new practice but one with a long and brutal history connected to colonization, slavery, internment, and imprisonment. This project connects these histories to the specific cruelty being enacted spectacularly on children at present. The photographic setting is designed to highlight the monstrous border policies of forcibly caging children in indefinite and inhumane detention and, as such, evokes the cruelty of the “tender age” facilities and tent cities being produced as part of the ever expanding Migration Industrial Complex. #NEVERAGAINISNOW #NOCAGES

This art intervention is designed to stress the brutality of forced cagings, separations, and divisions. It is also an invitation to imagine, through its sounds, words, and its digitally-produced photographs and their stark background context, a vast expanse, a world perhaps, without borders. ¡ NO CAGES. NO BORDERS ! What would that look like? Feel like? Do? And be? 

In addition to the pop-up art exhibit, this event will feature live poetry by writer and community organizer, Leticia Urieta, and others, and a community conversation between the project creators and Alicia Torres of Grassroots Leadership. 

7:00pm Food and Drinks
7:30pm Live Poetry
7:50pm Community Conversation

This event is free & open to the public.

Pupusas y pasteles provided by Pupuseria 503 y Mas. 
Cerveza provided by Co-Sponsor Hops & Grain Brewery.

About the Speakers

Adela C. Licona is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona. She is a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee for the UA Institute for LGBT Studies. She is affiliated faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies, Mexican American Studies, the Institute of the Environment, and the Frances McClelland Institute for Children, Youth, and Families. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests include cultural, visual, gender, and sexuality studies, critical theory, social justice media, community literacies, action-oriented research, borderlands studies, environmental justice, and place-based and feminist pedagogy. She has published in such journals as Antipode, Transformations, Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, Community Literacy Journal, National Women’s Studies Association Journal, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, Nóesis, and Kairos, has co-authored numerous community research briefs, and has publications forthcoming in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Peitho. Adela is author of Zines In Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric (SUNY Press, 2012) and co-editor of Feminist Pedagogy: Looking Back to Move Forward (JHUP, 2009). She is co-founder of the Crossroads Collaborative and of Feminist Action Research in Rhetoric (FARR), a group of progressive feminist scholars engaged in public scholarship and community dialogue. She is Editor Emeritus of Feminist Formations and serves on the board for Women's Studies in Communication (WISC), QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, and Spoken Futures / Tucson Youth Poetry Slam. Adela is the 2015 and 2016 Co-Chair of the National Women's Studies Association Conference.

Eithne Luibhéid is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona (UA). She served as the Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at UA from 2007-2011. She holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her research focuses on the connections among queer lives, state immigration controls, and justice struggles. She has been an invited speaker at universities including Harvard, Oxford, the Open University, the University of Amsterdam, and the National University of Singapore.

Dr. Luibhéid is also our 2018-2019 Latino Research Initiative Distinguished Fellow. We have been honored to support her work during the past year. 

Luibhéid is the author of Pregnant on Arrival: Making the ‘Illegal’ Immigrant (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (University of Minnesota Press, 2002). She is the editor of “Queer Migrations,” a special issue of GLQ (2008), and the co-editor of A Global History of Sexuality (Wiley Blackwell, 2014); Queer Migrations: Sexuality, Citizenship, and Border Crossings (University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and “Representing Migrant Women in Ireland and the E.U.,” a special issue of Women’s Studies International Forum (2004).

Alicia Torres is a member of ICE Fuera de Austin, a community group made up of immigrants, many of them undocumented. The group fights to keep families that live under the threat of deportation together. ICE Fuera de Austin believes no one should be deported and that the only fight that is won is the one that is fought as a community. Second to the youngest of a large  family that came to Austin in 1992, Alicia is no stranger to how national and local policies that aim to normalize hyper enforcement of families are introduced and play out in our communities. As a member of ICE Fuera de Austin she aims to work alongside the Austin immigrant community so that all Austin families can one day feel safe under their own definition of safety, and no Austin families have to live under the threat of deportation.

Leticia Urieta is proud Tejana writer from Austin, TX. Leticia is a graduate of Agnes Scott College with a BA in English/Creative Writing and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University where she worked with author Jennifer DuBois.

She works as an artist and educator in the Austin community with a focus on the pedagogy of equity in creative writing. She teaches at St. Edwards University, and is the director of Barrio Writers in Austin, a free college level youth writers workshop founded by author and activist Sarah Rafael Garcia in Santa Ana, CA. She is also the co-founder of Lenguas Loc@s Writers Collective for womxn writers in the greater Austin community. Recently, Leticia was accepted to the Austin City Emerging Artist Fellowship to aid her in continuing her work in the Austin area.

Sponsored by: Latino Studies, Grassroots Leadership, Nepantla, USA and Hops & Grain Brewery