A book launch, photography exhibit and bilingual conversation on the arts as a path to community strength that celebrates identity, joy and the reclaimed body. Featuring Queer Chicanx P’urhépecha storyteller Maribel Martínez in dialogue with Spanish author María Mínguez Arias and borderlands photographer Liliana Hueso.
The creators will reflect on how bodies are perceived by society and the systems within it. Mínguez Arias presents her hybrid memoir/essay collection, Naming the Body: A Queer Woman’s Restorative Mapping of the Self (2026), an internationally acclaimed work exploring self-restoration. Complementing this, Hueso introduces her photography exhibit, “Lenchas y Marimachas,” a Tijuana-based project documenting the visibility of masculine-presenting queer women.
Through Mínguez Arias’s evocative prose and Hueso’s unique storytelling photography, we honor the intersection of Mexican borderland experiences and queer Hispanic-European perspectives. Together, these three voices offer a profound exploration of visibility, power and the art of self-definition.
Connect
Liliana Hueso - website | María Mínguez Arias - website
Bios
Liliana Hueso is a queer, bi-national, bilingual photographer, filmmaker, professor and activist whose work bridges visual storytelling, education and community engagement across the U.S.–Mexico border. With over 20 years of experience in youth advocacy and arts-based nonprofit work, she centers narratives often overlooked by mainstream media, using photography and film as tools for connection, resistance and healing. Trained in film production and mass media communications, Liliana’s creative practice expanded into photography during her graduate studies, where she began to explore image-making as a deeply personal and political act. Shaped by lived experience in both Mexico and the United States, her perspective as a Borderlands artist informs her approach to documenting identity, place and belonging. Her films and photographs have been exhibited in bi-national conferences, festivals, galleries and community spaces. Through her lens and her teaching, Liliana amplifies marginalized voices while mentoring emerging artists and creating space for queer, diasporic and borderland stories to be seen and honored.
María Mínguez Arias is a fiction and non-fiction bilingual writer, translator and random editor. She is the author of Naming the Body: A Queer Woman’s Restorative Mapping of the Self (Mouthfeel Press, 2026): the English translation of her acclaimed Nombrar el cuerpo (2022) named among the Best Queer Lit of the year in Spain and included in Vanity Fair’s Pride List. She is also the author of Int’l Latino Book Award winning novel Patricia sigue aquí (2018), and co-editor of #NiLocasNiSolas: narrativa escrita por mujeres en Estados Unidos (2023). Her essays and short stories appear in anthologies and journals in the US, Spain and Mexico. She delves into her identity as an immigrant, queer woman, mother and Spanish-language writer in the US to explore subjects such as memory (digital, familial and historical), motherhood, language, the body and everyday life and strength as experienced on the margins. With her writing she aims to widen the space where literature exists, because in her opinion, it has been way too narrow for way too long. She is part of what has been coined the #NewLatinoBoom: a 21st century movement of writers, editors, publishers, and other literary professionals that, aided by all things digital, are doing the work in Spanish and in the United States. She works as interim co-Executive Director at feminist press Aunt Lute Books in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her partner and their two young adult children.
Maribel Martínez (no pronouns/use name) is a Queer Chicanx of P'urhépecha heritage, brainiac, storyteller and dream warrior from East San José, CA. Maribel shapeshifts between public policy, higher education and the arts. Maribel performs and writes short stories, poems, plays, napkin memoirs and may even sing you a Mexican bolero or ranchera. Maribel is a member of Sandra Cisneros’ Macondo Writers Workshop, UCSB’s Califas en Comunidad writers’ group, Primeras Paginas playwright’s circle, The Multicultural Arts Leadership Institute (MALI) Silicon Valley, and was a founding member of La Peña’s Hybrid Performance Experiment Ensemble and The Queerceañera Project SJ. Maribel is a recipient of the inaugural Movimiento de Arte Y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) Cultura Fellowship, the California Arts Council Emerging Artist award, and a Center for Cultural Innovation grant. Maribel’s play for young audiences, Becoming (MAR), premiered at Teatro Vision in 2022 and was broadcast on CreaTV San Jose for six months. Its sequel Mar in the Middle had a staged reading at the School of Arts and Culture in 2023. The final installation of the Mar trilogy is currently funded by Horizons Foundation and had a reading in spring 2025. Maribel’s short play Out for Finals was part of the San Jose City College inaugural playwright’s festival in 2024. Maribel’s work has been published in the Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento Anthology, EASTside Magazine, Journal X, and Beyond Queer Words: Queer Anthology. Maribel is a 2024 Cultural Bearer fellow with the Bay Area American Indian Two Spirit (BAAITS) organization to produce a performance piece on the meaning of Two Spirit. Maribel's latest works Post Post Pre Party Ritual (2025) and Watchale (2026) focus on desire and joy or Queer bodies" of a certain age." Maribel is an adjunct faculty in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at San Jose State University. Maribel is the founding manager of the Office of LGBTQ Affairs for the County of Santa Clara, the first office of its kind in the United States and is serves on the leadership team of the Division of Equity and Social Justice.