Trans-Atlantic Time in the Borderlands: Racialized Gender and Becoming in the Work of Alan Pelaez Lopez

Abstract: Alan Pelaez Lopez’ Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien (2020) animates multiple temporalities to expose the intertwined histories that converge at the contemporary US-Mexico border. The text dismantles common linear progress accounts of both US immigration and gender transition and departs from common tropes of travel and border-crossing common to trans literatures from the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. While the poetry collection is often situated in conversation with Latinx culture and undocu-activism, I read Intergalactic Travels alongside contemporary Black trans feminist theorizing to consider how it moves away from the question of legality and legibility and I suggest instead that we read the text for how it emphasizes becoming, a present-tense movement that mediates multiple spacetimes. Intergalactic Travels explores racialized gendered subjectivity beyond normative frameworks, challenging the reader to understand trans literature as necessarily engaged in rethinking identitarian categories altogether, toward the creation of a Black trans feminist future.