My name is Eilen Itzel Mena and I am a senior at the University of Southern California (USC) studying Fine Arts and Urban & Sustainable Planning. Throughout my undergraduate years at USC my intellectual and artistic practice have been interconnected. As an Afro-Latinx scholar artist intensive research fuels my creative work. My artistic work has discussed issues within African-diaspora Latinx culture, blackness, femininity, and the divine. My urban and sustainable planning work and research has touched upon agricultural and cultural sustainability within the culinary arts of the African diaspora. Ultimately I am drawn to the ways in which different environments affect the lives of people in the African diaspora in the Americas. By being a mixed-media sculpture artist and critical thinker within the context of the physical makeup of developing societies I am to create physical spaces, experiences and design systems to protect and underscore this historically oppressed Afro-Latinx population.