Borders and Bodies: a Discussion Panel and Film Screening
Marshall Alvarado | Nov. 12, 2025
On November 6th, collaborators in the history, philosophy, English and media and communications departments at Warren Wilson College (WWC) worked with the WWC library, hosted the “Borders and Bodies: Panel Discussion and Film Screening” with support from the Nielsen Humanities Grant . Approximately 90 students, staff and faculty enjoyed a conversation with local and national community organizers, who shared their past and present advocacy efforts for trans, immigrant and healthcare justice. Following the panel, which was held at Canon Lounge, the organizers screened the unreleased art-documentary, “La Perla Victoria: Desde un Corazón Trans,” which traced the experience of a transgender Salvadoran immigrant woman.
“Borders and Bodies” featured three speakers, including Jennicet Gutiérrez, co-executive director of the national advocacy organization, Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and Sol Palacios, its national organizer. The organization works at the local and national levels to achieve the liberation of trans, gender nonconforming and queer Latinx communities through organizing, advocating and educating. The third speaker was Marisol Jiménez, founder and chief executive officer of Tepeyac Mountain Sanctuary, an organization that works to achieve social justice with an understanding of the impacts of personal, collective and ancestral trauma on individuals.
Guitiérrez shared her appreciation for the invitation to the event and why these types of discussions are significant to her.
“I was invited to talk about migration, what's happening in the trans community and the intersectionality of those two issues [along with] how the community has been really heavily under attack,” Guitiérrez said. “Just having that connection and understanding what is happening and what we can do [made it] was crucial for me to say yes and be part of the conversation.”
Cris Culton, visiting assistant professor of history, played an important role in gathering speakers and helping initiate the planning for the event.
“Several of us in the humanities [departments] and the library thought about this political moment and who we could invite to this event,” Culton said. “I was really looking for a member of the panel to be local to the community that's here, because I think all activism starts local, even if it has a national agenda.”
Sarah Sgro, visiting assistant professor of English and communications, also assisted in planning and hosting “Borders and Bodies.”
“It's a wonderful thing to be a part of, especially during my first semester here,” Sgro said. “I think we're all very passionate about reminding students about the urgent, real-world applications of thinking about things like critical race studies and immigration studies.”
The event itself was full of students ready to learn and ask questions surrounding the topics of transgender and immigration rights, and with many asking about how they could help in these issue areas.
Culton appreciated that the event prompted students to think about the concepts and processes that are accepted as normal and how their normalization impacts the world around them.
“One of the things that I think is so important about this event is to really think about the violence of bureaucratic processes,” Culton said. “We naturalize something like the border. We naturalize concepts like citizenship. One of the things that I would like us to think about is, what does it mean to think critically about whether or not citizenship is a socially constructed category [and] to what extent [do] borders represent a violence that is rooted in capitalist processes? The exploitation of labor, the exploitation of resources, has a very serious impact on individuals and communities...not only in Mexico or in the United States, but the entire world. ”
Sgro believed the event would allow her students to connect what they have learned in class to real-world circumstances.
“As people who are teaching humanities in the classroom in ways that maybe can feel abstract at times, [“Borders and Bodies” will] really call students’ attention to real-world applications of things that we're talking about in the classroom,” Sgro said. [They will] also get to hear from people who are doing the work; people who are activists, who are making art, and who are meeting, going to conferences, working on legislation around these issues, and social justice issues surrounding queerness are talked about all the time at Wilson. Wilson celebrates itself as a very Queer campus, so I hope that this will be an opportunity to bridge that conversation with conversations surrounding migrant justice, which is ultimately inseparable.”
Gutiérrez shared her thoughts on the importance of having people attend the event and hear the experiences of transgender immigrant communities, especially because of the wave of anti-transgender laws that have recently been proposed across the United States.
“I think these events are necessary and they're critical,” Gutiérrez said. “We cannot wait because what we are seeing is something the LGBTQ immigrant community had experienced before becoming so visible through social media, before seeing things on television, before seeing states across the nation coming up with very anti-trans laws that want to erase and create more violence and discrimination and deepen the transphobia. I think these conversations and hearing the community say, ‘We have been under attack,’ is important. This is nothing new.”
Although things seem grim in the world, WWC offers these discussion events for students to attend and learn what they can do to help. In addition, there will be classes offered this upcoming spring semester that expand on the topics discussed during the panel: History of Modern Latin America and History of Gender, Sex and Sexuality are two courses being offered by Culton and Digital Activism, which will be offered by Sgro and Beck Banks.