Kaito Campos de Novais

This artivist ethnography examines how Latin American queer and trans immigrants use art as a means of social justice to fight against State repression in Oregon. The U.S. has long used necropolitical measures to dehumanize racialized, diasporic, and gender-nonconforming people. Recently, the long-established Latin American communities of Oregon have been terrorized by a brutal rampant of immigration enforcement. The artivismo made by Latine queer and trans immigrants entail the visceral vivências of violence and rejoicing of bearing life in this scenario. Why are they transforming arte into artivismo? What do artivismo reveal about strategies of survival and political expression in the borderlands? How are creators and creations reflecting, deflecting, and counter-acting State violence? This ethnographic inquiry reveals how the interplay of federal/local administrations and authoritarian/neoliberal ideals of nation-building create complex experiences of racialized and gendered injustices. Highlighting the everyday efforts to build spaces of creativity within-against zones of State terror, my work expands anthropological awareness of the relationship between art, agency, and necropolitics. Using collaborative, autoethnographic, and multimodal methodologies to turn my ethnography into a work of artivismo itself, I propose an innovative framework for anthropology to engage with borderland art as political and epistemic practices.