Tell us about your work and how your work contributes to contemporary Afro-Latinx studies.

My academic research is indebted to Black and Indigenous cultural studies, undocustudies, abolition studies, and hemispheric transgender studies. I am currently working on an academic manuscript, trans*imagination, a theoretical essay collection that analyzes "containment" as an analytic to understand how antebellum and contemporary U.S. legal codes attempt to govern the radical trans* imagination. The work contributes to Afro-Latinx studies in thinking of the relationship between containment during the middle passage and plantations as parallel to the containment of Black (continental African and Black Latin American) trans* subjects in federal prisons and immigrant detention centers.

In my social art practice, I think of internet memes as modern versions of the pamphlet and wheat-pasted posters, meaning that I also understand social media as an emergent geography where borders, territoriality, and governance are enacted. Rooted in the history of Black newspapers printed and written by Black activists, artists, and intellectuals in Uruguay between 1870-1950, my meme-production is invested in expanding dialogue about the limits and possibilities of nation-states, identarian politics, and racialized experiences as legal and geographically specific realities. Through the hashtag "Latinidad is Cancelled"--made possible by Black Twitter and Black Instagram users-- my art practice asks: what types of solidarities can be built when racialized Black experiences are centered in conversations about Latin America, the Caribbean, and transnational Black social movements?

What ideas do you have to enrich the NYU community?

I am thrilled to be joining the NYU community and I look forward to engaging in conversations about how gender and sexuality trouble and expand the ways in which we think through Afro-Latinidad as an identity, (racialized, legalized, and spiritual) experience, a form of touch, and a tool of kinship-building. I hope that students feel comfortable reaching out and imagining queer and trans* Afro-Latinx futures together.

What does it mean to be named this year's Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow?

I am thrilled to be a MJR fellow because when I think about Jiménez Roman's legacy, the first word that comes to mind is "kinship," which is most obvious in the creation of The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States. Afro-Latinx studies, as a field, is only possible through collaboration. Afro-Latinx people are differently Black, none of us are the same, and I thank Jiménez Román's scholarship for teaching me that.