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Anna Flores

@_pochaterca

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A 2026 recipient of the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture’s Artists to Work grant, poet Anna Florez is creating a poetic inquiry project centered on people traveling the long-standing shuttle routes connecting Phoenix, Tucson and Nogales.

One of the central questions of her project is “How do we, as mixed-status communities, maintain relationships and care networks amidst heightened violence and enforcement?”

Read more from @jamie.montoya at the link in bio and at calonews.com/arizona. by @_pochaterca

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14 days ago

thinking about land defenders 🪢

Map shows human and non-human mobility across space and time in these bordered lands; migrant deaths recorded 2000-2025; observed jaguars 1859-2015; multiple forms of movement and interruption: border patrol checkpoints, ports of entry, ice facilities, border walls and fences, and a giant testament against the wall’s false power: the Madrean Sky Islands.

Datasets sourced through ArcGIS Online from Esri and respective data providers. Layers have been renamed for this map as a Poem/Legend. by @_pochaterca

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2 months ago

the doñas at the hair salon finally granted me my baby bangs by @_pochaterca

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2 months ago

Synthesizing new ways of thinking as the cartography course I was a part of for 10 weeks (what!) comes to a close.

Mapping as brainstorming and processing/imagining collective grief. Mapping as play. Mapping as counter-mapping.

sources :
Gentry et al., Indigenous Survival and Settler Colonial Dispossession on the Mexican Frontier (straight up everyone needs to read this especially Chicanx border thinkers)
Inside Climate News , “AZ Border Wall Expansion Will Impact Wildlife”
Arizona Memory Project “What’s On in Tucson AZ” 1943
Photos by @__3lzz by @_pochaterca

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2 months ago

The past few months, we’ve been steadily gathering stories about journeys across O’odham Jewed; how people retrieve memory and imagine the future alongside historical struggles in these bordered places.

The shuttle services and their routes have become, in the aftermath of mass deportation, a form of cultural seismology and represent a terquedad to build love and maintain connection despite state-enacted separation.

I’ve spent a lot of this time with my new brothers and sisters, crying. I keep saying to them: “I’m not a journalist. I’m a poet.” as if that may ease us into some other realm where our binding pains grow us wings to fly.

When home becomes a detachment.
A swing for the anatomical heart.
A tearing away from the earth.
We’ve committed ourselves to a journey;
Some of us become ghosts along the way,
And others arrive but remain
Looking back.

* storytelling and recording on a moving shuttle bus is a true sport lol* by @_pochaterca

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2 months ago

keeping time and knowing space by making art <3 by @_pochaterca

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2 months ago

May 2025, When I Miss You, I Think of the River by @_pochaterca

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4 months ago

📣 Announcement! 📣

We are excited to introduce you to our 2026 cohort for the Artists to Work Grant Program!

Anna Flores | Artist Bio

Anna Flores is an ASU MFA graduate and 2025 Frontier OPEN Poetry Award recipient. She has work in The Nation, Columbia Journal, Huizache, and more. Her film Border Dweller Love screened nationally. She teaches at Estrella Mountain Community College and leads community workshops in Phoenix and Nogales.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To learn more about the Artists to Work Program, visit: phoenix.gov/arts.

Stay connected to future opportunities by joining our newsletter! bit.ly/phxartsnews

Photo Credit to @naderabushhab

This post 10 of 10 by @_pochaterca

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7 months ago

birthday poem 2026

i can tell you what the world has gifted:
a daughter and grandmothers
and aunts and sisters

welded by the earth,
river fused bodies in caravan,
two handfuls of mud for remembering this,
yesterday’s broth and peeled pomegranates
full of moonlight to be eaten
together

it’s taken me
30 years to learn how showing love
is a thing of great risk
a risk that bears new sun
that burns who is closest
that when i show my heart
its light will not disown me

more surprising is:
that if it means we break open the sky
if it means we get to share one meal
and maybe never again if it means we make medicine that outlasts us
if it means we tell the truth out loud and trembling even though my heart

is eaten sour like hot cactus fruit
i’d do it again /// i’ll do it again

but this time i’ll keep my barbed spines

🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀

First year I think of this birthday poem practice as my gift to myself and that realization makes me feel so full.

Photos collaged and cut from some really gracious work with @__3lzz by @_pochaterca

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9 months ago

Cataloging here a year of writing. Making prose requires a muscle like the pelvic floor of thinking and language; so deep it feels like cold earth from far down desert clay. It’s a strange, strained practice. I’m still feeling around for a sturdy foundation to write from. I don’t think it’ll ever come but the grasping and reaching mean something about life that I hope to keep struggling through. by @_pochaterca

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9 months ago

Making the medicine is the medicine. 🌀

the learning curve making this temazcal was steep but we put trust in our brain cells and ancestral knowledges and some googling

We also took an Adobe block workshop with @melinasartinez maybe a year ago? Can’t remember but learning the cob making process was a crucial skill to get this baby up

My homegirl Itza actually enlightened me with the name for this — what I initially called “Adobe sweat house” and since then we’ve held the history of this medicine between different imaginations of ceremony and ritual

The work itself: cob plaster over a diamond lath steel dome (made from recycled materials) and covered in a lime wash plaster + lime wash. Our hands and labor and making time to come together made it possible to get this up in 1 month and a half!

❤️ by @_pochaterca

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9 months ago

🙏 love from the pen by @_pochaterca

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a year ago