Exhibit Dates: April 12 - July 27, 2025

Centro Cultural de la Raza Anti-Border Futures is the final installment in Centro Cultural de la Raza’s Borderlands Visions series, centering creative resistance to the violence of borders. Rather than accepting imposed divisions, the exhibition imagines revolutionary alternatives to living, connecting, and belonging beyond borders.

Inspired by Chicana queer theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of the border as “an open wound,” the exhibit embraces contradiction as a starting point for transformation. For those who live at the border, the pain is real—as is the power to reimagine the world. Featuring works by XoQUE, Cog·nate Collective, Eagle and Condor Liberation Front collective, Colectivo Subterráneos and artists from the Kumeyaay nation, and others across the méxico–u.s. borderlands, the exhibit also includes a striking pieces by internationally acclaimed artists Einar and Jamex De la Torre.

Anti-Border Futures invites reflection, dialogue, creativity and the radical act of imagining life without borders—political, sexual, geographic, or psychic. It’s a space to be whole and to dream together beyond artificial divides.

Closing reception:  Gallery exhibit until July 25th

Gallery hours 12 to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday.

Curated by: Alessandra Moctezuma: 

Nanzi Muro, Katie Ruiz, 

Ana Andrade, Marco Ramirez Erre 

Featuring:

XoQUE Collective

Cog•nate Collective

Cog•nate Collective develops research projects, public interventions, and experimental pedagogical programs in collaboration with communities across the US/Mexico border region.

Since being founded in 2010, their work has interrogated the evolution of the border as it is simultaneously erased by neoliberal economic policies and bolstered through increased militarization – tracing the fallout of this incongruence for migrant communities on either side of the border.

XoQUE is a border art collective of diverse identities that revolve around women who are Xicana/x, Mexicanas, and Native, committed to social and racial justice. The word XoQUE can be translated to “crash” or “collision” in Spanish. The “X” is Nahuatl or Indigenous for the “Ch” in Chicana/x, and “X” marks the spot in colliding with the status quo and in providing a visual counter-narrative. XoQUE centers on multiple voices and dynamic interactions between artists, people, and ideas that crash and hold space for authentic feminine selfhood. Members include Berenice Badillo, Selina Calvo, Sandra Carmona, Jennifer Clay and Shirish Villaseñor.

Colectivo Subterráneos (Underground Collective) is a multi-generational group of Oaxacan artists, primarily composed of young people, who create relief prints and murals to illuminate social issues. The collective formally started in 2021 with just six members and has since grown to over thirty members. They maintain a multipurpose space in the center of Oaxaca where they make, show, and sell art and run a free art school called Escuela de Arte para el Pueblo (Art School for the People). Social movements in Oaxaca and beyond have shaped their artistic and political traditions. Inspired by internationalist leftist artists, their name purposefully aligns them with working-class, exploited, and oppressed communities who occupy spaces below the upper class and outside of top-down politics and social hierarchies. 

Colectivo Subterráneos

Borderlands Visions committe

The Borderlands Visions Committee is made up of Centro board members and staff. They meet biweekly to oversee the events, programming, and budget related to the Borderlands exhibit funded by Mellon

Featuring:

Alexa Macías Mojica Julia Hernandez, Ana Villalpando, Mariana Alvarez, Julie Freeman, Lauryn Dove, ITA, Roberto Camacho, Nico Fronterizo, Soledawg, 

Ale Uzarraga, Alejandro Morales Riveron, 

Jade Amargo Verdeflor, Maya Grace Misra, César Miranda Trejo, Sandra Carmona, Lerida Armendariz 

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Alessandra Moctezuma is Gallery Director and Professor of Fine Art at San Diego Mesa College, where she leads the Museum Studies program and teaches courses on Chicano Art. Ms. Moctezuma has extensive experience as a curator, instructor, artist, and in public art administration. Besides being the gallery director at the college, she has curated exhibitions for art spaces and museums, including unDocumenta (2017) at the Oceanside Museum of Art as part of the Getty’s initiative Pacific Standard Time LA/LA and a retrospective of Chicana artist Judith F. Baca, Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, for the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach (July 2021 – March 2022).

Join us August 1st at Centro Cultural De La Raza for 1904 Chicanografia!

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Indigenous Border Lands