Elva Orozco Mendoza

All Prisoners Are Somebody’s Children: Mothers ROC—Resisting People of Color’s Captivity Through Direct Action

Elva Orozco Mendoza (Assistant Professor of Political Science and WGSS, UConn)

with a response by Julia Brush (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

Wednesday, January 25, 2023, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Add to Google calendar Add to Office 365 calendar Add to other calendar

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Following the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles, California, several grassroots organizations emerged to protest the growing imprisonment of Black and Latino men under false or exaggerated charges. One such organization was Mothers Reclaiming our Children, Mothers ROC, formed by women whose children had been incarcerated as they sought to promote a gang truce to bring peace to their neighborhoods. This chapter draws on historical archives, films, web content, and other literary sources to discuss Mothers ROC’s grassroots mobilization against forced separation due to their children’s imprisonment. I argue that Mothers ROC’s activism helped to change the persistent association of Blackness and criminality produced at the highest levels of government by reclaiming motherhood as a political and ethical orientation. While often stigmatized and blamed for fomenting their children’s lawless behavior, Mothers ROC members worked to reclaim their children in several ways. First, by contesting their physical captivity and denouncing the institutions that deliberately fabricated the systematic imprisonment of Black and Latinx youth. Second, by invoking the mothers’ right to tell their children’s stories instead of allowing the state criminalization efforts to go unchallenged. Third, by working to change structural injustice and call public officials accountable for their actions. Lastly, by healing the harm inflicted onto their children and strengthening community ties. As a result, Mothers ROC’s initiatives contributed to longstanding struggles for Black people’s freedom in the United States.

Elva Orozco Mendoza is an assistant professor of political science and women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Connecticut. She joined UConn in the fall of 2021 and received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in February of 2015. Prior to joining UConn, she taught at Texas Christian University and Drexel University. Her research interests include extreme gender violence, democratic theory and practice, protest politics and political action in Latin America, comparative political theory, and coloniality/decoloniality thought. At UConn, she teaches courses in comparative political theory, decolonial feminisms, and Latin American and Latinx feminist theory.

Julia Brush is a doctoral candidate in English with a graduate certificate in Literary Translation at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on contemporary poetry and poetics, queer theory, and transnational American studies, critical refugee studies, and Asian American Studies. While at UCHI, she will complete her dissertation, “State/Less Aesthetics: Queer Cartographies, Transnational Terrains, and Refugee Poetics.”

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

‘The Algorithm You May Never Learn:’ Cyborgian Potentials and Contemporary Asian American Poetry

Julia Brush (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

with a response by Elva Orozco Mendoza (Political Science & WGSS, UConn)

Wednesday, October 12, 2022, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

Add to Google calendar Add to Office 365 calendar Add to other calendar

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

This talk draws upon the work of queer cartographies, transnational terrains, and refugee poetics to argue that the the digital space, although borderless physically, represents paradoxical spaces of erasure and possibility for marginalized people. Considering contemporary LGBTQ+ Asian American poetry, this talk questions whether the cyborg figure can offer alternative claims for citizenship and subjectivity while centering the exploration of what it means to be human in a digital age in the United States. This inquiry focuses on the work of queer Korean-American poet Margaret Rhee, feminist new media artist, and scholar of ethnic literature, whose poetry employs the perspective of and in the form of cyborg subjects. Acknowledging that “the digital” serves as a globalized site and capitalist-driven enterprise that is both alienating and disenfranchising, this argument nevertheless counters these dystopian visions via the cyborgian potentials envisioned in Rhee’s collection, Love, Robot (The Operating System: 2017). Given that digital and machinated writing can be mimicked to suggest collaborations between AI technology and artists, cyborgian potentials suggest that subjectivities marked through the vectors of race, gender, and sexuality are capable of overwriting the dominant machines of hegemony. I argue that the cyborg figure offers a critical response to the conception of digital subjects as “neutral” or otherwise essentialized and becomes a liberatory figure within recent Asian American poetry.

Elva Orozco Mendoza is an assistant professor, jointly appointed in the Department of Political Science and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with affiliations in El Instituto and the Graduate Certificate in Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Her research draws on decolonial feminist thought, critical contract theory, comparative political theory, and feminist analyses on maternal activism in Latin America to examine maternal collective action launched in response to extreme violence—forced disappearance, feminicide, targeted killings, and mass incarceration—in the Americas. Her monograph, tentatively titled The Maternal Contract, examines bottom-up agreements between the victims’ mothers to defend their children against state-led and state-enabled violence and criminalization. It argues that mothers’ collectives in the Americas constitute powerful political actors seeking to problematize and counter the normalization of disposable life. By theorizing the maternal contract, this current research contributes to ongoing initiatives to decolonize Western political theory by attending to subaltern actors’ actions and political ideas. Her research addresses major concerns of humanist scholarship, namely how marginalized political actors resist top-down attempts to expel them from the realm of citizenship and humanity.