Kiri Avelar Presented at Dance Studies Association Conference

Assistant Professor Kiri Avelar presented her paper titled “Transnational Family Dance Lineages of the U.S./Mexico Bracero Program (1942-2022)” at the Dance Studies Association conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina in July.

Abstract:
This presentation (re)maps two Latinx artists' transnational family dance lineages by drawing a connecting line from their contemporary practices in 2022 to performances that originated in the U.S./Mexico Bracero Program in 1942. The (re)mapping of the artists’ (physical) self-practice becomes a portal to their families, ancestors, and the diasporas to which they belong across the visual-spatial-temporal boundaries of Zacatecas in Mexico, and Washington, California, and Texas in the United States. Each distinct (re)mapping traces a different complexity of transnational diasporic selfhood and (re)maps the artists’ embodied genealogies (Anzaldúa 2015; Cisneros 2019) through the U.S./Mexico Bracero Program at the intersection of feminist data activism, borderlands culture, feminista transborder dancemaking, and digital mapping to understand and put in theory and praxis digital humanities knowledge-making (Fernández 2024) from transborderlands and transnational intergenerational dance perspectives.