TUCSON, AZ.- MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) Tucson presents Living With Injury, an exhibition that represents the predominantly Mexican American communities of Tucson’s southside who led one of the earliest and most successful environmental justice movements in the United States. The exhibition is organized by guest curators Dr. Sunaura Taylor (Disabled Ecologies Lab, UC Berkeley) and Alisha Vasquez (Mexican American Heritage and History Museum), and features work by artists, journalists, and researchers with deep connections to this history, including Alex! Jimenez, Franc Contreras, and Dr. Denise Moreno Ramírez. Drawing from both archival research and lived experience, the exhibition offers a space to reflect on collective memory, to acknowledge damages visited upon the community by defense industry pollution and environmental racism, and to celebrate the triumphs of southside organizers.

2025 marks the 40th anniversary of Tucsonans for a Clean Environment (TCE), one of the most formidable groups that organized in response to the contamination. That same year, local investigative journalist Jane Kay published a series of articles in the Arizona Daily Star that publicly confirmed what communities on the southside of Tucson had known for years: pollution from defense industries was contaminating the aquifer, making people sick, and in too many cases, killing them.

The TCE history is a story of loss, but it is also a story of how a community fought 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.

Building off the insights and questions of organizers and impacted community members, this exhibition asks: 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?

On November 14th at 5:00pm, journalist Jane Kay and writer & historian Dr. Lydia Otero will be in conversation to discuss their reporting and scholarship around contamination and contested landscapes in Tucson.

Living with Injury is a part of a city-wide initiative, Survival and Resistance: Remembering the Southside’s Environmental Justice Movement, a series of commemorations led by local institutions, artists, and activists across Tucson. Survival and Resistance 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; AZ Humanities, Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern AZ; 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 with support from the MOCA Tucson curatorial department.