From the Ground: Zero Of (In) Tolerance «El Paso/Juarez» Resistance on the Front Lines of a Manufactured War
The Department of Art & Public Policy invites you to join us for a conversation with Arts Politics alum Juan Ortiz '10.
About Juan Ortiz:
Juan Ortiz is a community organizer, artist, and activist who was most recently a finalist for a 2020 Blade of Grass Fellowship In Socially Engaged Art, a 2017-2018 Right of Return Fellow, a Baltimore Social Innovation Fellow (2016) and the Creative Alliance’s Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Fellow in Community Art for 2016-2017. He is presently a doctoral student, instructor and fellow in Mexican American studies at the University of Arizona with a minor in American Indian Studies, where his research concentrates on the effects of mass incarceration in a border context. Ortiz is also a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) Community Arts Department in Baltimore Maryland attaining a Masters in Fine Arts degree..
Ortiz also holds a Masters in Art and Public Policy: Arts Politics from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and a Bachelor of Arts in Multidisciplinary Studies from the University of Texas, El Paso. While in Baltimore, as a fellow at the Creative Alliance, Ortiz curated and produced the first ever Latinx/Chicanx in Baltimore and created a series of workshops and a 4 year series of conversations about race and racism called Neighborhood Voices that ran before, during and after the Baltimore Uprising. He also instituted an Activist Speaker series that brought in a variety of activists from across the Baltimore/DMV area.
Since his time student organizing in the 2006-2007 Immigrant Mega-Marches to his current work Juan Ortiz has a lifelong interest in social justice and has over 20 years of organizing around a myriad of intersectional issues. He is a member of various coalitions and organizations including Immigrant Families Together (IFT), Moviemineto Cosecha (El Paso), the Border Patrol Victims Coalition and the Tornillo Occupation Coalition. Whose membership includes members of organizations like the Red Nation, No More Deaths, Global Alliance for Justice and the School of Americas Watch. His current work on the border involves a model of resisting and assisting using a methodology born out of the need to both provide humanitarian aid to migrants on the border while also engaging in resistance work that includes artistic expression and direct action.
For his work in the Southeast Baltimore Latinx community, Ortiz was selected as a Community Partner to the White House Action Summit in 2015 and that same year was a guest speaker at CityLab Baltimore hosted by the Atlantic magazine, the Aspen Institute and Bloomberg Philanthropy. Generationally from El Paso, Texas Ortiz has lived, worked and studied in El Paso throughout his life but has also participated on various nationwide and international social justice campaigns. Among them, the Force, Border Tour of the Monument Quilt and Movimiento Cosecha’s national campaign for immigration reform. As a native of El Paso and the borderlands Ortiz’s work draws from his familial history of activism and organizing around issues that directly affect border communities.