in your face:
intersectionality, identity, and architecture alan mota
biography My name is Alan Mota and I am a Mexican born immigrant born in Puebla, Mexico. I am a third-year architecture student coming from the accelerated program. I think my interest stems from my father’s profession in construction and remodeling. I would go help my dad from a young age and would see a different house almost every other day, big houses, small houses, modern houses, old houses, apartments, lofts, office buildings, and animal hospitals. Growing up I was always confused where I belonged because being born in Mexico makes me an undocumented immigrant. This title made me experience many political struggles as a person in this country. For example, I could not get a license without the DACA status that I hold, which for the moment is the only thing allowing me to stay in this country legally. Being an undocumented person also means I have to pay out of state tuition in a state in which I have lived since about 9 months old and from hard-working parents with low paying jobs. One last thing I strive for in my every day is to inform the Latinx community that there are opportunities out there for everyone after high school, and seeing as to many Latinx people have worked in construction in some way, architecture is a very viable path that can be taken to provide for a better living, which in short is all my family and I are here for.
face mask: a call to abolish ice
manifesto:
the lost immigrant architecture Architecture is about the representation of ideas into sketches, sketches into models, models into plans, and plans into construction. Architecture has historically been limited to the ideas of a small range of people and it is time for that range of ideas to largen up to a broader range of communities. Architecture must know that there is a small representation of the Latinx community both in architects as well as architectural projects. Architecture must see a bigger presence from the northern end of Mexico to the southern tip of Argentina. Architecture should have a bigger presence of immigrants, undocumented immigrants, Daca status immigrants, Mexican immigrants. Architecture needs more representation of unheard communities, because after all life experiences are the driver of the architect’s ideas.