Art and Social Justice: A Collaborative Question

Many people become involved in public art projects to help foment social justice.  Is the connection always so direct? The participants in this dialogue – Art and Social Justice: a Collaborative Question? – will share their reflections on the choices facing the building of a collective, the process of collaboration, the building of an aesthetic practice, the places for public interventions, and the relationship of artists to the communities and social movements who helped make them. 

Dr. Bernadine Hernández, author, activist, artist, is part of the fronteristxs collective in New Mexico, where they have become involved in movements protesting and challenging incarceration for migrants, residents and First Nations people in the greater Albuquerque biozone.

The Borderlands Collective – comprised in its San Marcos iteration by artists and scholars Mark Menjivar, Jason Reed, Molly Sherman, Adetty Ramos Perez de Miles, and Erina Duganne – has been involved in building collaborative installations rooted in the aesthetics and ethics of long-standing migrant communities with connections across international borders across the Americas.

In response to ICE Raids in Hays County, Mano Amiga – a local community organization -  formed out of a need to organize and campaign against the detainment and deportation of undocumented people in the US. They have expanded our goals to advocate for criminal justice policy reform in Hays County. The student chapter will reflect on the role of art and publicity in their recent campaigns for decriminalization and decarceration in Hays County.

For more on the Borderlands Collective, see their recent edited collection, Otherwise, it Would be Just Another River: Ten Years of Borderland Collective’s Practice in Collaboration and Dialogue (Leipzing: Spector Books, 2022)

Dr. Bernadine Hernández is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico.  She is also a Faculty Affiliate in Women of Gender & Sexuality Studies and a Faculty Affiliate in the Latin American and Iberian Institute. 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.