Can language practices break down the separation between “us” and “them”? Reid Gómez, a native speaker of Black vernacular English and Navlish (Navajo-English), shares her multi-lingual writing practice. To “make the story speak,” she criss-crosses the boundaries between languages, embracing various linguistic structures and vocabularies simultaneously. Her writing moves away from oppositional colonial frameworks and toward a more fluid poetics of relation. This allows each of us to perceive one another as related rather than separated. In this final episode of Season 1, she explores the idea of “quantum entanglements” and shows how the relationship between writing, translation, and the nature of being are not fundamentally different.

Dr. Gómez is a writer and scholar from San Francisco, CA. She currently is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. Her latest writing project, The Web of Differing Versions: Where Africa Ends and America Begins, engages with Silko studies, Indigenous studies and Critical Black studies.

What is it like to navigate a world where “no papers” means no identity and no public recognition? For immigrants traversing such a world, are human connections even possible when faced with forced family separation and deportation? Anike Tourse's filmmaking brings audiences into the human dimension of navigating the complexities of US immigration. Through collaboration with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and other organizations, she makes work that raises awareness about immigrant contributions to society.

Anike Tourse is a writer, director, actor, and producer based in Los Angeles. She has written for One Life To Live and Girlfriends, which are among the first television series to primarily feature a multiracial and socioeconomically diverse cast of characters. She wrote, directed, and starred in the 2023 film America’s Family that sheds light on the tumultuous experience of a family whose teenage child is arrested following a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Visual artists are skilled at taking ordinary materials and transforming them into something new and thought-provoking. Their work goes beyond aesthetics; it unearths histories, challenges perceptions, and sparks crucial conversations. In the US where racism is endemic—structured into the everyday existence of individuals and institutions so as to appear ordinary—how do artists rework the remains of racism and resist its traumas in the present? In this episode, Aaron Coleman and Lizz Denneau exhume their multiracial pasts using DNA tests, ancestral research, personal experiences, and artistic expression. With a potent mixture of pride and pain, the two artists reveal the rewards and responsibility in making art that challenges and corrects historical fictions.

Lizz Denneau is a Tucson-based multi-media artist and K-12 art educator. Her artwork draws from personal and global histories to express diverse themes of identity, memory, and race. Her teaching incorporates contemporary art methods, visual literacy, and social justice.

Aaron S. Coleman is the Kenneth E. Tyler Chair and associate professor of art at Indiana University. He makes prints, paintings, collages, sculptures, and installations that connect historical events to the current sociopolitical climate.