Lorgia García Peña

Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces within institutions that exclude women and queer people of color, particularly institutions of learning. Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, she invites us—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures.

In 2020 we saw the world coming together to protest state-sanctioned antiblackness in the United States. This happened as the world shut down, leaving to die the most vulnerable amongst us, as migrants continue to cross oceans and desserts in search for safety and as countries closed their borders with walls and military actions to keep poor and Black people out. Translating Blackness invites us to think about the ways in which antiblackness and xenophobia operate together producing new forms of racialized exclusion throughout the world. Lorgia García Peña invites us to think about antiblackness as a pandemic, looking at its roots in the histories of overlapping colonialisms that have shaped the greater part of our modern world. She invites us to translate blackness, to think beyond our national contexts, in order to create networks and communities of empowerment and hope.

From the fruit we pick to the cars we drive, immigrants are a critical part of our economy, providing important labor for everything we consume while also performing the majority of the care work for our children and elderly. Yet, in national and international politics, migration and, more importantly, immigrants are regarded as a point of contention dividing or uniting the electorate in any given year or geography. In this talk, Lorgia García Peña humanizes immigration by grounding it on her own journey as a child immigrant and her experiences growing up between her native Dominican Republic and the United States. From her experiences as a child immigrant to her work with undocumented students, Lorgia walks us through the ways in which immigration shapes the lives of people in the United States while shedding light on the multiple ways in which the immigrant experience intersects other experiences of minoritization.

This presentation centers the work of educators in shaping our society and world. Addressing teachers, Lorgia García Peña argues for making the classroom a “freedom space”, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.

Latinidad. Who are Latinos? What significant historical nexus shape Black Latino experiences? What has produced the erasure, silencing and marginalization of Black Latinos in the United States and beyond? This talk traces the narrative history of what award-winning scholar Lorgia García Peñacalls the “Latino difference” through which Black Latino people are erased from the great stories and foundational narratives of the nation(s) they helped build. But while projected as outsiders to both Black and Latino communities, identities, and political struggles across the hemisphere and beyond, Lorgia argues Black Latinx are foundational to the projects of Black citizenship and of Transnational Latinx consciousness. What can Black Latinidad teach us about the future of Global blackness, particularly as it intersects with immigration, and other forms of minoritized and colonized subjectivities?Understanding Black Latinidad andgetting acquainted with its histories, this talkcan help us better see the relationship between past and present exclusions: how colonial histories continue to shape present-day oppression of minoritized people of color and what that might mean for future immigration policies as well as acceptance in Black and Latino communities and beyond.