One day you are making a living, owning a business, raising a family… The next one, you're being deported. Trump's anti-immigration policies have turned thousands of people who have been living in the country for decades into "undocumented" residents. However, art and literature don't need a green card for crossing borders.

'Movement,' this year's Lit-Luz Festival of Language, Literature, and Art, asks us to consider migration, social movement, and bodies in motion through international collaboration and dialogues between Mexican and Chicago artists.

The festival will feature dozens of conversations, performances, screening, and bilingual migrant storytelling to remind us that language has the power to create a new world.

The award-winning writer Luis Alberto Urrea - nominated for a Pulitzer in 2005 and author of the acclaimed non-fiction book 'The Devil's Highway' - is presenting at this new Lit-Luz edition, where Mexican female writers and the power of language as resistance will also take an essential part.

Mexican Verónica Gerber Bicecci describes herself as "a visual artist who writes." She is one of the most well-known personalities who will speak at the festival, and her work explores the limits between text and images. The poet Sara Uribe, whose work reflects the relationship between bodies, poetics, and politics, will also be present at the festival.

Both artists will discuss women's rights in Mexico and the political importance of feminist movements such as #Metoo and #MiPrimerAcoso.

There will also be a chance to remember the Stonewall riots and its queer artistic expressions on the 50th anniversary of this historic event.

Since Lit-Luz is the only U.S. cultural festival to feature Mexican writers, it fosters the creation of new art through international collaborations that dynamite artistic frontiers. 

That's why experimental works such as the "video-quake," recorded by the Mexican director Dalia Huerta-Cano and the writer from Chicago, Eula Bliss, are key pieces.

The video-text piece joins Dalia's memories from the devastating Mexican earthquake in 2017 to Eula's moves in her 20's.

Soundwaves as a sort of migration - this is the sense of the collaboration between the poet Emily Jungmin Yoon and the Mexican experimental musician Israel Martínez, a multimedia installation that will also be an exhibit at the Lit-Luz Festival. 

Meet these artists and many more at Li-Luz Festival! And remember, if you find a bunch of bureaucratic documents you didn't know you need next Monday in the streets of Chicago, ask for the Office of Migratory Perceptions…