fabian romero

Tribe: P'urephécha
Based In: Shoreline, WA
Email: fabiortizromero@gmail.com
Social Media: @fabiandemichoacan
Website: fabianromero.com

About the Artist
I grew up making things, it was how P'urephécha knowledge was passed down. As I learned to sew, my mother told me stories and history. Art is part of my upbringing, it is Indigenous knowledge and it is political. As an immigrant to the United States and an uninvited guest to shared Coast Salish and Duwamish land, I am invested in using art to raise questions about responsibility to Coast Salish sovereignty, Urban Indian identity, and the everyday occurrences of ongoing settler colonialism and settler capitalism. One such material consequence of settler colonialism is the violence of borders, especially on already vulnerable populations such as LGBTQ immigrants. Recently it has been revealed that many of the people en-route to the United States are being forcefully dispossessed from their land of which they are Indigenous. I come from a mestizo and Purepecha pueblo and left my homeland as an economic refugee, seeking a way out of the almost inescapable poverty that settler colonialism in Mexico places on Indigenous people whilst dispossessing us from our lands to open factories or expand drug cartel activities. Because of this, pueblos of my Purepécha people have taken up arms against the cartels and government officials in Mexico, yet those of us born into mestizo pueblos grew up without that possibility and many flee to the US as agricultural workers. That is my family history; I am a child of braceros, I came to the US an undocumented child, I am a former agricultural worker, I am an Indigenous Mexican.

My current work is on kinship. I believe that kinship, relationships with human and nonhumans (including land-based relationships) are necessary to imagine a world where Urban Indian queers are safe and free. Poetry and short films give me tools for imagining these worlds. By observing in detail the events that lead to dispossession or oppression, I can create a map for people to understand how these systems affect every day and in turn how we can navigate them better. I believe that poetry also holds the potential to open readers' imagination as they read my work and I hope that they imagine new worlds with me.

I am a committed artist, in 2018, I was awarded a Fellowship with Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment (R.I.S.E.) for my interdisciplinary artistic work, including my poetry, films, and activism. My experimental poetic films (short films narrated by my poetry), “to be home,” “Three Routes,” and “future dispossessed” have been exhibited in several art exhibits including Yehaw, an all-Indigenous Showcase in Seattle in 2019, Bordxer an Indigenous Latinx Showcase in Portland, Oregon. In January 2019, five of my poems will be published in the online Journal 580 Split. I have performed my poetry in various venues throughout the United States since 2007 including UC San Diego, University of Washington, California State University Northridge, Portland State University, and many more.

About the Artist
Fabian Romero P.h.C. (Purepécha) is a student in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Fabian’s academic interests include racial capitalism, settler colonialism, Black Feminist Studies, American Indian Studies, Indigenous feminism, gender, and sexuality. Poetry and artistic collaboration are integral to their research that centers the performance of gender, sexuality, and authenticity for queer, LGBTQ Indigenous, and two-spirit people. As an interdisciplinary researcher, Fabian’s academic work combines fiction writing, poetry, and autoethnography to theorize queer, LGBTQ, and two-spirit Indigenous kinship and art collaboration as vital to imagining Indigenous futures.