Itzayana Gutiérrez Arillo is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies from McGill University.
Their work focuses on print culture and how industrial graphic forms have the possibility of racial violence built into them. They hold a Master's and Bachelor’s in History from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (UAEM,) respectively.
Gutiérrez Arillo doctoral dissertation Forms of violence: Comic strips, comic magazines and the anti-Chinese campaign in Mexico, 1911-1940, develops a media history of the anti-Asian aesthetics and forms of violence that they see as part of the cultural and industrial foundations of contemporary print culture in the Western Hemisphere. Specifically, they have investigated how the colour yellow, in North American printed matter and in formats printed in Mexico for Latin American distribution, operated as a racial signifier during the first half of the 20th century, when the growth of the media-based cultural industries took shape alongside campaigns for the expulsion, internment and repression of Asians throughout the Americas.
Additional to this doctoral research, they have studied ethnohistoric relationships between Asia and Latin America, from the 16th to 19th century, as curator and researcher at Barroco Museo Internacional (BMI) and Museo de las Culturas-INAH in Mexico.
Their most recent curatorial and digital design for the Cabaret Commons reflects on underground print culture, lesbian ephemera, and the tensions of transcultural belonging and not to wider experiences of queer time and nightlife.