Living With Injury

Nonfiction filmmaker Franc Gabriel Contreras was born and raised on the southside of Tucson, Arizona and he graduated from Sunnyside High School in 1981. His award-winning documentary short films have been shown at major film festivals around the world. Franc is also a veteran news correspondent reporting from across Latin America since 1996. His television and radio reports and documentaries have been broadcast worldwide to millions of people in most continents. Franc is currently working on a feature-length documentary that explores how the historic TCE aquifer contamination problem affected his community.

Alexandra (Alex!) Jimenez is a Chicana print-maker, illustrator, designer, mother, and public artist. Her artistic practice explores her connection to land, culture, and history as a fourth generation Mexican-American in Tucson, AZ. Alex began her career in the sciences, obtaining a BS in Animal Science from Cornell University.  It was her love for discovery and exploration that led her to the science field and ultimately led her to the creative field. In 2014 she received a BFA in Visual Communication from the University of Arizona.  Shortly after graduating she received the Research and Development grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts to pursue her typographical alphabet book, Abecedario del Sur. Since then, Alex has explored many forms of art making but her work has continued to center around the Sonoran Desert and the Southside of Tucson where she grew up. Recently, her love of community and collaboration led her into work as a public artist. Throughout 2021 and 2022 Alex worked as the first ever Artist-in-residence for Tucson Water and created opportunities to engage the public in art making about water. In 2022 Alex won funding for her first large scale public art piece “In Memory Of” which is a community engaged public art project that honors people who have died of COVID-19. The final memorial was installed in December 2023.

Dr. Denise Moreno Ramírez is the assistant director of the Earth League Secretariat at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University. She is a nationally recognized interdisciplinary scientist with community-engaged research and environmental justice expertise. She blends environmental science and medical anthropology and has worked on transdisciplinary scientific teams to solve environmental contamination and health problems. Moreno Ramírez directs the Secretariat led by co-chairs Peter Schlosser and Johan Rockström. Moreno Ramírez's prior research spans 24 years. It includes designing virtual reality public-facing products with rural museums, making them hubs of local climate knowledge (Climate Heritage ILLuminated in Arizona), preserving oral histories of individuals living in hazardous contaminated spaces for future generation edification (Voices Unheard: Arizona's Environmental History); understanding how volatile organic compounds interact in workplace air and impact low-wage, minority workers in beauty salons and auto shops in Arizona; developing peer education modules for Mexican Community Health Worker to devise environmental health programming at the community level; and partnering directly at hazardous contaminated sites (Superfund Sites) to establish community-led environmental research projects. She has received prestigious awards, such as the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (T32), a highly competitive award designed to support the most promising and talented researchers in the early stages of their careers. She also received the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice Fellowship from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, a recognition that underscores her significant contributions to the field of environmental justice. She was also awarded the President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, a highly selective and competitive fellowship supporting promising early-career scholars. Her research has also been featured in national and international media, including The Guardian, Environmental Health News, Inside Climate News, and SXSW.



About the Curators

Dr. Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer. Her most recent book is Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (University of California Press, 2024), which is a history of the struggle for  environmental justice on the southside of Tucson. She is also the author of  Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets and her artworks have been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multispecies studies, and art practice. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Alisha Vasquez is a krip, Chicana mama whose Tucsonense family has occupied the unceded homelands of the Tohono O’odham, Apache, and Yoeme people for six generations. Becoming a parent funneled all of her past experiences, knowledges, and beliefs into a new solidification of her values where she became a more joyous version of her analytical self. She honors her Mexican American-Tucsonense family, punk rock, living disabled, an acceptance and rejection of the academy, and existing within community as the epochs of her education until becoming a parent. Vasquez holds a BA in History and Women's Studies from the University of Arizona and MA from San Francisco State University where her graduate work examined the rise neoliberal capitalism alongside multiple social movements in the United States, emphasizing disabled and Chicanx intersectional material realities. She taught middle school, high school, and college using these positions to resource the community. She is currently the Communications and Accessibility Manager Southwest Folklife Alliance / National Folklife Network; Co-Director of the Mexican American Heritage and History Museum at the Sosa-Carrillo House; and is following through on passion projects that use her training as an historian, community organizer, and educator to capture what it means to exist in so-called Tucson.



Exhibition Programming

Join us on November 14 from 5:00 - 6:30 pm for a conversation between journalist Jane Kay and writer historian Dr. Lydia Otero who will discuss their reporting and scholarship around contamination and contested landscapes in Tucson.



On December 13 from 2:00 - 5:00 pm, in connection to the current exhibition Living with Injury, is a TCE healing commemoration at Mission Manor Park that will include an unveiling of a permanent memorial created by Alex! Jimenez to those lost to and impacted by TCE. Local dignitaries and impacted community members will speak including journalist Jane Kay and representative Adelita Grijalva, and Tucson Filmmaker Franc Contreras will include footage of this event on his documentary about TCA, The Plume. Learn more here

Submit a photo of your loved one impacted by TCE to be honored at this event.

This event will take place at Mission Manor Park located at 6100 S 12th Ave, Tucson, AZ 85706.

Image Credit: Sunaura Taylor, Speculative Aquifer. Pen and ink on rectangular paper; Franc Contreras, Ode to the Southside (video still), 2025. Courtesy the artist.