Political Equator III is a two-day, cross-border mobile conference and community forum to be held in June 2011. The third program in a series of binational conferences, PE III continues to engage pressing regional, socioeconomic, urban, and environmental conditions across the San Diego–Tijuana border. These meetings have focused on a critical analysis of local conflicts in order to reevaluate the meaning of shifting global dynamics across geopolitical boundaries, natural resources, and marginal communities. Attracting an international roster of artists, architects, environmentalists, scholars, community activists, and politicians, PE III will focus on the neighborhood as a site of production, investigating practices in the arts, architecture, science, and the humanities that work with peripheral neighborhoods worldwide—where conditions of social and economic emergency are inspiring new ways of thinking and doing across institutions of urban development and public culture.

Teddy Cruz was born in Guatemala. He began studying architecture at Rafael Landivar University in Guatemala City (BA, 1982), and after emigrating to the United States, continued his studies at California State Polytechnic University at San Luis Obispo (BArch, 1987), spending a year in Florence, Italy, under Superstudio founding member Christiano Toraldo Di Francia. After working with the firm of Pacific Associates Planners & Architects in San Diego (1984–89), he went to work in the office of San Diego architect Rob Wellington Quigley (1989–93). In 1991, Cruz received the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture, becoming a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and he completed his architectural education at Harvard University (M.Des.S, 1997). In 1999, he established his research-based architectural practice studio teddy cruz in San Diego, California.