PMA Assistant Professor Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz spoke at the University of Pittsburgh’s Latinx Connect Conference on Friday, April 4. Aldape Muñoz was part of a panel of leading critical dance studies scholars that included Jade Power Sotomayor, Irvin Gonzalez, and Manuel Cuellar.
Drawing from issues of undocumented migration, social choreographies, and diasporic cultures, this panel engaged in a multifaceted conversation about the interconnection between dance, social justice, and the embodiment of Latinidad. At the core of this panel lies how the Latinx body, largely understood as a broad and complicated category to trace migrations flows, cultural dynamics, and racialized bodies in movement, create, contest, and reimagine the very limits that restrict free passage across spaces.
“I was invited to join a select group of scholars and practicing artists from across the country to discuss the links between dance studies and Latina/o studies,” said Aldape Muñoz. “I spoke about the important role that choreographic frameworks can play in giving us language to properly assess and rethink immigration enforcement. I mined the early twentieth-century border archive of important federal workers to demonstrate how the border patrol was explicitly created to be “elastic” rather than rigid as is popularly discussed. I provide examples of artists grappling with the stretchiness of the border since the early 2000s. They are united by creating performances that offer and make possible a more welcoming sense of moving in the world for aliens and citizens.”
