Living With Injury
September 5, 2025 – January 2026
East Wing Galleries
Living With Injury is an exhibition that pays homage to the predominantly Mexican American community members whose uniquely Tucson methods were remarkably successful in fighting some of Tucson’s most powerful defense industries responsible for contaminating water sources, causing severe illness within communities on the southside of Tucson in the 1980s. The exhibition is curated by Mexican American Heritage and History Museum Co-Director Alisha Vasquez and Dr. Sunaura Taylor of the Disabled Ecologies Lab at UC Berkeley, and features work by local artists and researchers who have lasting connections to this history including Tucsonense artist Alex! Jimenez; southside turned Chilango journalist and filmmaker Franc Contreras; and community researcher and scholar Dr. Denise Moreno Ramírez. Living With Injury also invites community members to participate in various remembering acts and collective history making, both to acknowledge damages visited upon the community by environmental racism, and to celebrate the triumphs and insights of southside organizers.
2025 marks the 40th anniversary of local investigative journalist Jane Kay’s explosive series in the Arizona Daily Star that publicly confirmed what communities on the southside of Tucson had known for years: pollution from nearby defense industries was contaminating the aquifer, making people sick, and in too many cases, killing them. While many in Tucson remember the pollution, fewer know of the powerful environmental justice movement that emerged from it. The group Tucsonans for a Clean Environment formed shortly after the publication of Kay’s articles. They named themselves after the acronym for Trichloroethylene–TCE–an industrial solvent that became synonymous with the pollution on the southside. The group would help spur one of the earliest and most successful environmental justice movements in the United States.
Living With Injury honors these formidable organizers, not only to remember their history, but to help shed light on the many environmental and racial justice issues facing Tucson and the surrounding region today. The TCE history is a story of loss, but it is also a story of how a community fought back against racism; against long histories of colonialism, dispossession, and gentrification; against the negligence and exploitation of defense industries; and against the systemic neglect that left people having to deal with severe illnesses and diseases without support. This is a story of how they fought back and how they won.
Building off the insights and questions of organizers and impacted community members, this exhibition asks the following questions:
- How do we begin to repair the vast trails of human and more than human injury that emerge from extractive and exploitative industries and policies?
- How do people, communities, and ecosystems live with illness and disability?
- How can collective remembering, storytelling, and memorializing create the world anew?
Through art, conversation, and convening, Living With Injury creates space and community to reflect on such questions, promoting much-needed conversations and linkages across critical disability perspectives, environmental justice, and Chicanx and borderlands studies.
Living With Injury is part of a broader series of events that are taking place across Tucson in 2025. Survival and Resistance: Remembering the Southside’s Environmental Justice Movement, celebrates southside resistance, survival, and healing through a broad range of community events and collaborations. The commemoration seeks to generate conversation and knowledge about environmental justice, health and illness, water justice, and Tucson’s Mexican American history by bringing people together across institutions, generations, and communities to remember, create, heal, and build new connections. The project is supported by Los Descendientes de Tucson and the Mexican American Heritage and History Museum; MOCA Tucson; Nuestras Raíces and the Pima County Library System; the Disabled Ecologies Lab at UC Berkeley; Dr Daniel Sullivan; and numerous local artists, researchers, and community organizers, as well as impacted community members themselves.
Living With Injury is organized by guest curators Dr. Sunaura Taylor and Alisha Vasquez.
Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Teiger Foundation, Dr. Sunaura Taylor, Arizona Humanities, and MOCA Tucson’s Board of Trustees, Ambassador Council, and Members.
About the Artists
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.
Image Credit: Sunaura Taylor, Speculative Aquifer. Pen and ink on rectangular paper.