Patagonia to Alaska

The idea came about shortly after my 35th birthday. I was pondering upon whether to become a parent and thought that the time to feel certain either way was running short. Despite intense societal pressure, biological motherhood did not really appeal to me, and that summer I promised myself to travel the Americas at 40 if I reached that age without kids.

I am now 40 and a full-time professor in a track that (fortunately) includes research leave. After four years in the job I have the privilege to conduct research of my choice for two terms and the summer, starting on January 1st, 2024 and finishing on August 31st.

Thinking about my promise, I have chosen to explore abortion access activism in the Americas. This is a subject very close to my academic and personal interests: In 2020, I cowrote an article about the need to decriminalize abortion in my native Colombia; and in 2022, I wrote a response to the United States Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade with my late mentor, feminist legal scholar Drucilla Cornell.

In February 2022, the Constitutional Court of my home country ruled that abortion until week 24 is the right of all people. Meanwhile, in June of that year, the Supreme Court of the US, my other home country, joined the long list of legislatures in the Americas that fail to protect a person’s right to abortion upon request. In this context, I am interested in learning from different movements for abortion access in Latin America — some of which have achieved a change in abortion legislation — and also from those reproductive justice organizations in the United States that are now responding to the fall of Roe and the rapid criminalization of abortion across many states.

My intention is to chat in my travels with folks who are knowledgeable about these topics. An ethnography of sorts.

I have no solid travel plans other than a couple of flights and a few fixed dates. I will spend my June birthday and the month of August in NYC, flying into JFK from Anchorage, AK on August 1st; I am planning to go to Europe for two weeks in May to lead a workshop at Cambridge and participate in a series of art exhibitions in England and Berlin; I am co-leading Rutgers University’s Alternative Spring Break in the Dominican Republic in March; my friends and I will attend the Carnaval de Barranquilla in February; and I start my adventure on January 3rd, when I will fly to Santiago from Bogotá and travel with my dad through the Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia and then to a small town near Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia.

I have the intention to rest, practice yoga, read, write and draw during my travels. I have always loved reading, yet being an academic has somehow affected my ability to do it for the fun of it. I selected four books to read during my adventure, and I asked six dear friends (all of whom recently came with me to my 40th birthday trip in Colombia) to recommend one book each.

So these are the ten books I would like to read as I cross the American continent: Palestine by Joe Sacco • Diarios de motocicleta by Ernesto Guevara • Kindred by Octavia Butler • Policing the Crisis by Stuart Hall • Paul takes the form of a mortal girl by Andrea Lawlor • Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad • all about love by bell hooks • The Days of Afrekate by Asali Solomon • Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson • A World Between by Emily Hashimoto.

During my travels I will also be working on If We Survive the Future, an auto-fiction graphic novel I am writing with my creative partner, Peter Quach, named after one of the best mixtapes of all time, by multimedia artist Illexxandra. It is my wish during the trip to talk to my mom and dad, grandmother, aunts and uncles and cousin to further uncover the story of my parents.

Peter and I have been creating If We Survive the Future for five years. As we wrote the story of our relationship — which takes place in the span of ten years and delves into issues related to immigration, family and culture, mental illness, and polyamory — we realized that the tale could not be told without including significant portions involving our parents, which predated both our births. We came to appreciate that this is actually the story of us and our parents: The trauma we inherited, the joys we shared, the everyday struggles of holding on to each other and, at times, to our very lives.

We have scripted a 31-page first chapter, and Peter is in the process of drawing, inking and lettering eleven of those pages in preparation for an art exhibit at the University of Cambridge next May. The chapter is an auto-fictional account of PQ’s parents’ escape from Saigon in 1975.

Since we have decided to also include my family story in our graphic novel, we are researching it now and, even though we know the big strokes of my parents’ tales that we want to explore, we have never interviewed any member of my family. Until now.

In this blog I will record my travels, chats and encounters, my thoughts on the world around me and the books I’m reading, and also my own drawings of what I find in this adventure. The illustration that accompanies this first entry is a 2014 drawing of me in Vietnam by PQ. I would like to make my own illustrations for the following blog entries.

I feel fortunate and grateful for this opportunity para explorar mis raíces and to jump into the unknown, both by myself and with people I love <3