As trans rights and embodiment are under attack in the United States, trans activists and legal activists are advancing a broad trans rights agenda in Mexico, introducing legislation in Congress to codify the rights of children to claim and express their gender identity as they and their parents see fit. Meanwhile, like millions of other migrants, Mexicans and Mexican American trans women have historically lived across and beyond national boundaries. Our invited guests discuss their experiences of advocating for trans rights in Mexico and the United States, of the joy and grief of living trans lives across national boundaries, and of the Venn Diagram that is migrant death and trans deaths in the U.S. Southwest. The panelists’ discussion of their experiences cruzando gendered, legal and geographic fronteras will be accompanied by two performances that illustrate the complexity of living life across boundaries.
The panel will consist of a conversation with Children’s Rights Legal Advocate Tania Morales; Author and Activist Alejandra R. DeRuiz; Performance Artists and Activists Lía García, and Angel Lartigue, moderated by Prof. Laura Gutierrez.
Participants
Tania Morales
Lawyer, art historian and activist. She’s an adviser of the Network for Gender Equality (REDIGE in Spanish) and an advisory assemblywoman of COPRED. Tania founded the Asociación para las Infancias Transgénero AC. which is an organization that mainly accompanies and strengthens mothers who are going through the processes of gettingthe recognition of the gender identity of their trans* children. She’s created strategies for the enforceability of rights. During her five years leading the organization, she supported federal, state, administrative, legislative, and judicial processes to secure the right to identity for transgender and non-binary youth. She designed the first protocol for schools with transgender and non-binary children and teens and, to this day, supports families and schools in its implementation. She has promoted the participation of transgender and non-binary youth in consultations conducted by federal and state-level institutions to develop public policies for their protection. She obtained the first “Amparo” granted by the Mexican Federal Justice Board to a person under eighteen years old to prevent a pathologizing trial and secure their birth certificate through a simple administrative procedure. She collaborated in creating the first protocol for the care of transgender and non-binary minors in Social Assistance Centers in the state of Nuevo León. She coordinated the books:
– “SumaTe: Trans Children in Mexico” (2020)
– “Schools: Development of Individuals.” (2024)
She directed the animated short films:
– “La T en Corto”: experiences of a family with a trans* kid” (2019)
– “Transversalidades”: experiences of trans* and nonbinary youth in the educational system.(2024)
Lia García
(La Novia Sirena) Mexico 1989. She is an educator, poet and oral storyteller. Her trans activism projects have focused on creating performative and scenic proposals that question the effects of violence on dissident identities. Creator of the project “Cucarachas literarias”, the first archive of LGBTIQ children’s and youth literature. Published in sexto piso, editorial Sitges and the Instituto Hemisférico de Performance among other editorial media.
Laura G. Gutiérrez
is Associate Professor of Latinx and Mexican Performance and Visual Studies in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves as Associate Dean for Community Engagement and Public Practice in the College of Fine Arts. She has received support from the Getty Research Institute and from UT’s Provost Author’s Fellows program for the book she is currently completing, Binding Intimacies in Contemporary Queer Latinx Performance and Visual Art. She is the author of Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage, winner of a Modern Languages Association book award, and has published catalog essays, journal essays, book chapters, and reviews on performance, visual arts, film, and video art. As Artistic Director of OUTsider (Austin, TX), Gutiérrez programs the organization’s annual festival.
Angel Lartigue
is a curatorial and artistic researcher whose work explores the relationship between the body and land through the use of “putrefaction” matter as raw material. This concentration has led her to experimenting with archaeological processes of decomposition in artworks, incorporating fungi, insects, and even odors captured during fieldwork.
Lartigue’s Bacteriomancy (2022), a two-part performance, explores how living matter can carry memories of pandemics past and present brought about by colonialism, imperialism, and military occupation. For the group exhibition unending beginnings at University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA (2022), Lartigue incorporated organic matter such as seaweed collected from neighboring coastlines and extracted agar nutrients from the seaweed to grow bacteria and fungi in acrylic purses. Bacteriomancy culminated in a ritual performance during which Lartigue dissected and mummified a lamprey.
Lartigue’s solo exhibitions include Por los siglos de los siglos, Wedge Space Houston Community College, Houston, TX (2019) and La ciencia avanza pero yo no (Science Advances But I Do Not), BOX13 ArtSpace, Houston, TX (2017). She has performed and shown work in group exhibitions at the Outsider Art Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2022); DiverseWorks, Houston, TX (2022, 2019); The Latinx Project at New York University, New York, NY (2021); and Art League Houston, Houston, TX (2019), among others. Lartigue designed the label book, La ciencia avanza pero yo no (2017), which is in the rare books collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Hirsch Library, Houston, TX. She participated in the international conference “Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science 2020,” hosted by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Vienna, Austria, presenting her essay “Science at the Club: Putrefaction as an Artistic Medium.” Lartigue has given presentations and seminars at the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University.
Lartigue has been awarded grants for collaborative projects through the Idea Fund (2022, 2021), U.S. Latinx Art Forum’s CHARLA Fund (2021), The Grants to Artists grant through the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2023). She was an honorary research fellow to the artistic laboratory SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia (2020), and has been selected for the International Studies Curatorial Program as part of the Vision Fund for 2025.
Lartigue has undergone training in human remains recovery at the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State.
Alexandra Rodriguez
Alexandra is a native of Mexico City where she is currently living and identifies as a transfeminine person. She is Program Director at La Jauría Trans, a virtual activism and support program for trans and Gender Diverse people in Mexico City. She is also a freelance consultant and researcher in Gender and Sexuality. Alexandra is also an English teacher and translator.
Alexandra is a creative consultant in unitary collaboration using performance to make visible, denounce, and create a dialogue, narrating her experiences as a transfeminine, migrant person with mixed roots; crossed by these intersections that she considers a fundamental tool for her work as a human rights activist. Performance has been an important part of Alexandra’s life. Alexandra is also dedicated to providing workshops and cultural sensibility training on LGBTQI+ issues, organizing conferences and mobilizations internationally, including in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
This event is organized by NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and sponsored in part by The Latinx Project.