“Becoming Belonged”: Roberto Tejada on the Political Project of Photography and Poetry

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

In this episode Caro Fowler (Starr Director, Research and Academic Program) speaks with Roberto Tejada, a poet and art historian who in a professor in the creative writing program and the department of art history at the University of Houston, Texas. They discuss the decade he spent immersed in the literary culture of Mexico City, including working with Octavio Paz and the historical layers of the colonial project with the built environment there. He describes the political project of poetry and photography and shares his perspective on the changing landscape of Latin American and Latinx art within the discipline of art history. Finally, Roberto describes the possibilities and limits of what he calls “border-thinking” and “becoming belonged,” as part of his enduring commitment to the idea of encounter as an ethical position, and as a way of moving beyond the predicaments of extraction.