Join us for a virtual discussion with Fronteristxs:

“We are a collective of artists in New Mexico working to end migrant detention and abolish the prison industrial complex. We imagine and fight for a world of liberation for all.”

Read collective members’ biographies and register below.

Dr. Bernadine Hernández is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in transnational feminism and sexual economies of the US-Mexico borderlands, along with American Literary Studies and Empire, border and migration history, and Chicana/Latina Literature and Sexualities. Her book with UNC press is titled Border Bodies: Racialized Sexuality, Sexual Capital, and Violence in the Nineteenth Century Borderlands and is the first book length study that focuses on sexual capital and gender and sexual violence in the borderlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries through recovered archival work. She is also the co-editor of the first edited collection on Ana Castillo titled New Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo, published with University of Pittsburg Press in Spring 2021. Her other publications appear in Comparative Literature and Culture, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others.

She is also a public facing scholar and works with the artist and writer collective fronteristxs, a collective of artists and writers in New Mexico working to end migrant detention and abolish the prison industrial complex through creative activism. Fronteristxs provides free political education for community and youth throughout New Mexico on transformative justice and abolition. She sits on the City of Albuquerque Public Arts Board and the Working Classroom Board.

hazel batrezchavez (b.1994) on Stolen Land of Shawnee Tribe- shelby, OH is an artist, educator and organizer whose praxis revolves around creating spaces of agency by centering anti-colonial gestures, inverting practices of authority, and critiquing violence related to skin color, and language. batrezchavez received their Bachelor of Arts Degree in Studio Art and Anthropology from Grinnell College in 2017 and Master of Fine Arts from the University of New Mexico in Sculpture in 2020.Currently they reside on the unseeded territory of Tewa and Pueblo Peoples also known as albuquerque, nm where they are working with Szu Han Ho, Bernadine Hernández and Martín Wannam as part of the fronteristxs Collective to end migrant detention and abolish the prison industrial complex. 

When: November 8th, 2023 @ 3pm AZ + NM (2pm PT/5 pm ET)

Where: Virtual (via Zoom)

Cost: free

Martín Wannam (b. 1992, Guatemala) is a visual artist and educator whose work critically examines Guatemalan's historical, social, and political climate, focusing on freedom dreaming for the cuir individual. He focuses on the intersection of brownness and cuir utopia that uses the foundation of iconoclasm and the aesthetic of maximalism through the tools of photography, sculpture, and performance for the constant evaluation of systematic structures such as religion, coloniality, folklore, and white supremacy.

He received his MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico in Spring 2020, a Diploma in Contemporary photography from La Fototeca (GT) in 2016, and their BA in Graphic Design from the Universidad Rafael Landivar (GT) in 2015. Wannam has exhibited nationally and internationally, including various group and solo shows in Guatemala, The United States, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Korea. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill and part of the Fronteristxs Collective, a collective of artist fighting for migrant justice and the abolition of the prison industrial complex.

Szu-Han Ho’s work in performance, sound, and installation explores the relationship between bodies and sites of memory. They often work collaboratively, through collective action, structured improvisation, and group composition. Szu-Han's work has been exhibited at Tokyo Wonder Site, SOMA (Mexico City), VSF (Los Angeles), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flaship, Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco), and Revolutions International Theatre Festival. Szu-Han has been a recipient of the Art for Justice Fund Grant (2020) and Art Matters Grant (2019).

Szu-Han lives and works in Tiwa Territory (Albuquerque, NM) and is a founding member of the fronteristxs collective. Szu-Han is currently an associate professor in Art & Ecology in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico.