From Spin Racks to Collaboratories, & the Spaces Where We Become
- Frederick Aldama
- 12 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Not long ago, my friend and colleague Dr. Elena Foulis had me back on her Latin@ Stories podcast for a conversation about comics, collaboratories, and the spaces that shape us. An Associate Professor and Director of the Spanish Language Studies Program at Texas A&M, San Antonio, Elena has spent decades gathering oral histories of Latinx experiences across the United States.
Elena’s podcast, Latin@ Stories (Spotify, Apple, and Soundcloud platforms), grew out of her Latinos in Ohio oral narratives project, and it remains one of the most vital public humanities platforms we have: a space where our voices are recorded, preserved, and honored in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Her forthcoming monograph, Embodied Encuentros (Ohio State University Press, 2026), deepens this work into a full-fledged scholarly intervention.
This is all to say, when Elena asks you to sit down and talk, you sit down and talk.
Elena and I covered a lot of ground in our conversation: from spin racks in dusty tiendas to Shakespeare in the borderlands. But what kept surfacing, what I want to pull forward here, is a question that drives everything I do: What happens when you build spaces where BIPOC creators, scholars, students, and communities can come together not just to consume stories but to make them?
I shared with Elena how it all began, growing up a mixed Mexican-Guatemalan-Irish kid in rural north-central California in the '70s and '80s. In the small towns just outside Sacramento, you were either Redneck or Mexican. In elementary school, teachers cracked rulers across the knuckles of kids like me whose first language wasn't English. The sting was the point: it taught us never to speak that "dirty Mexican."
My sanctuary was the bottom of a spin rack at our local tienda. My safe space: the base of the spin rack where I could sit reading comics.
To this day, that rack keeps turning in my memory and became central to everything I do and build. But then it was my X-Mansion. My school for learning to read, write, and imagine beyond my proximate present.
The heroes I gravitated toward on those spinner racks were misfits and outsiders. Ben Grimm, a working-class Jewish kid from the Lower East Side, bullied long before he got his rock-thick skin. Charles Xavier, the educator-papá who gathered every misfit mutie under one roof. And heroes who hit closer to home: Bobby da Costa as Sunspot, blazing in dark solar-plasmic impenetrable form; Latina Firebird; Indigenous Red Wolf; Hector Ayala as White Tiger.
As I shared with Elena, that's the point: we've always been doing the imaginative labor of inserting ourselves into stories that weren't built for us. But what's happening now, especially in the last decade, is something different. Latinx creators are willfully and skillfully geometrizing word-drawn stories that breathe dignity and complexity into Latinoness across every genre: superhero, sci-fi, autobiographical, mythological, borderlands noir.
From the pioneers like Gus Arriola and George Pérez through the explosion of Los Bros Hernandez, Lalo Alcaraz, and the PACAS collective in the '80s and '90s, to today's unprecedented boom with creators like Henry Barajas, J Gonzo, Julio Anta, David Bowles, Javier Solarzano, Eliamaría Madrid, Kat Fajardo, Cristy Road, Miguel Hernández, Melissa Flores, Kevin Garcia, Jose Pimienta, E.C. and Ronnie Dukes doing incredible borderlands comics work out of El Paso, and so many others, today’s proverbial spinner rack is infinitely expansive.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to: talent without infrastructure is talent that dissipates. The work I've dedicated my career to, through scholarship, through the Latinographix imprint (Ohio State University Press), Brown Ink (FlowerSong Press), the Latinx Pop Magazine, the Latinx Comics Database—is about building the infrastructure so these stories reach audiences, so creators find each other, so the next generation sees career paths they didn't know existed.
That's what the Latinx Pop Lab is. When I came to UT Austin, I had the vision plan in place before I set foot on campus: a year-round collaboratory for workshops, screenings, symposia, and public conversations that brings together scholars, creators, students, and community members at every scale. The Lab powers our "Pop Quiz: Latinx Edition" series on social media and the Latinx Creative Critical Consortium Professionalization Day every November, an intensive mentoring event for graduate students, undergrads, and faculty from across Texas.
As Elena herself noted, when she brought an undergraduate student to one such event, the level of care that student received from established scholars and creators was extraordinary. That's the ethos. Hundreds of students have now gone through that program, and many have published their first articles, presented at national conferences, and secured competitive fellowships.
And then there's the signature event: BIPOC PoP.
Every March, we bring together BIPOC creators, scholars, game designers, animators, educators, librarians, and industry boundary-breakers for BIPOC PoP: Comics, Gaming, Animation & Multimedia Arts Expo & Symposium. Scholarly panels in the morning, creator workshops in the afternoon, screenings and performances in the evening, all-day Artist Alleys.
In just a few days from March 5-7, we will celebrate our fifth year. Hundreds will convene at the Glickman Center at UT Austin to shout from rooftops how academic rigor and popular accessibility aren't mutually exclusive, where events are intellectually sophisticated while remaining genuinely welcoming to families, fans, and first-time conference attendees.
The results are concrete. Emerging artists connect with established creators. Students discover career paths they didn't know existed. Scholars find collaborators across disciplines. Industry people are in the room, so deals get done and doors get opened.
BIPOC PoP 2026 is shaping up to be the biggest and most electric yet. The lineup of headliners alone tells you the range and ambition of what we're building:
Stephanie Williams: the force behind Nubia, Wakanda, and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur—who has redefined what Black women superheroes look like at DC and Marvel.
Melissa Flores: creator of The Dead Lucky and a writer whose work spans Marvel, Image Comics, Boom! Studios, and Oni Press—who is reshaping Latina presence in mainstream comics.
Veronique Medrano: a performance artist, musician, and creator of Dragonthrall—who dissolves the boundaries between visual art, sound, and narrative.
Paloma Martínez-Cruz: poet, performer, and author of Other Bombs—whose work detonates at the intersection of language, body, and political imagination.
Cathy Camper: author of the beloved Lowriders in Space series and Ten Years to Hear Snow—who has shown that Latinx children's comics can be joyful, complex, and wildly imaginative all at once.
Bahar Momeni: essayist and author of the forthcoming graphic semi-autobiographix The Trees We Carry that expands the genre's capacity for intimate truth-telling.
Alongside these headliners and other guest superstars, BIPOC PoP 2026 features hands-on workshops in animation, comics, and zine-making. Panels on publishing and creating. Fireside chats; exhibitions. And, our celebrated Critical Creative Awards honoring the next generation of BIPOC talent. The event is free and open to all—families, fans, students, scholars, creators, industry folks, anyone who believes that BIPOC storytelling matters. Public parking is available at San Jacinto Garage.
I think about why spaces like BIPOC PoP matter, and I think about what Dr. Elena Foulis is doing with Latin@ Stories, and I see the same impulse: the refusal to let our stories vanish. Elena records and amplifies Latine voices through oral history. I build collaboratories where creators and scholars collide and the next generation of BIPOC storytellers find their people. Both are interventions in the infrastructure of recognition.
From the launching of the Latino Comics Expo back in 2011, the Texas Latino Comic Con in Dallas in 2017, the Latinx Comics Arts Festival in Modesto to our BIPOC PoP launching in 2022, these gathering spaces have built pipelines for talent and cultivated readers and audiences.
They matter because community building at festivals, expos, and symposia creates the conditions for everything else: the book deals, the mentorships, the first published articles, the career pivots, the three-generation families who show up and see themselves reflected in art on the walls. These are spaces we make so we don't have to ask permission. We just create—and what we create lands.
So here's the invitation. If you care about storytelling at its most cutting-edge and representationally resplendent. If you want to see what happens when creators mind-meld with scholars, when ink meets innovation, when emerging artists sit across from the people who've been opening doors for decades, this is it: BIPOC PoP 2026!
Come to learn. Stay to build alliances. Leave transformed.
BIPOC PoP 2026: March 5–7, UT Austin, Glickman Conference Center, Patton Hall.
Free and open to all.
Dr. Foulis' full interview on Latin@ Stories
HERE!