Erica Ocegueda is a PhD student in Theatre Performance of the Americas at Arizona State University. She received her MA in Dance History and Criticism and a BA in Theatre and Dance with a Flamenco focus from the University of New Mexico. She also received a BA in Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz with an emphasis on Anthropology, specifically Mexican folklore. Ocegueda is particularly interested in issues surrounding cultural identity and expression through dance, and is examining how Azteca, Flamenco, and Mexican Folklórico dance relate to expressions of Mexican and Chicano identity. She is also interested in issues surrounding performances of indigeneity through dance particularly in Mexico and Gitanidad or Roma identity in Spain and in the United States as it is transmitted through Flamenco culture and how it informs Chicanidad, particularly in New Mexico. Erica is currently involved in a project with women in correctional facilities in Maricopa County, Arizona, called “Humanities Behind the Walls.” The project’s principal question is: “What can the academy learn about the penitentiary?”

Project Description:

Encarcerations Encarnadas…Being Down and other ways we are unfree. How do you mark absence? How do you fill in a blank that that was never there? Like a ransom note that is missing key letters for cognition how do we accommodate the systematic absence of adults and children encarcerated in the prison industrial complex? How does this change who is raised and who can be born? How is the topography of people of color and undocumented people in the US altered by their mass encarcerations? Humanities Behind the Walls (HBW) is a course designed to encourage the pursuit of higher education within Perryville, a minimum to medium security women’s prison in Maricopa County, Arizona. I coordinate the Performance based tract in HBW. This tract concentrates on how performance can offer the participants at Perryville and facilitators how to read and write to survive in various states of unfreedom. The initiative began as a collaborative effort between an inmate and a professor at Arizona State University (ASU). Expanding this collaborative relationship “Encarcerations Encarnadas” through the creative re-presentations of words and the absence of words explores how inmates at Perryville attempt to survive a correctional institution that was architecturally designed to limit and suppress performative expressions. Operating within the confines, limitations, and policing of the state correctional institute I attempt to integrate the poetry and spoken word performance texts, embodied ancestral stories, gestural topographies, and autoethnographic performances of the women of Perryville. Does my re-presentation of the women of Perryville work as a speaker to a whisper? Or does it impose a narrative that relies on pre-conceived notions of people in various states of unfreedom? What are the limitations and ethic complications of working with people who are actively being denied their humanity?