Laila Guadalupe Espinoza

Title: 
Graduate Student
About: 

B.F.A. in Community Arts, minor in Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies, California College of the Arts; M.A. in Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Laila Guadalupe is the daughter of a Roma mother and Mexican father and raised by her grandmother and aunties in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Her research is informed largely by her life experience as a border crosser and the consequences of the U.S.-Mexico National border such as the feminicide, narco-state, poverty and the maquiladora systems of terror and oppression. She is interested in how border communities perform social and intimate roles as both oppressor and oppressed and how the desert border landscape is curated as a form of social stage that directs and redirects the movement, behavior and relationships of and between all types of bodies, including bodies of water and mountains. Laila is also a visual and performance artist whose work in ritual and ceremony making seeks to interrupt this continuous [current] colonialism, to heal its resulting intergenerational and personal trauma and reconfigure ways of being rooted in indigenous cosmologies with futurism in present time space.