Book Talk: Laura Chávez-Moreno Presents "How Schools Make Race"
2024-11-19 11:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Book Talk: Laura Chávez-Moreno Presents “How Schools Make Race”

Event Date:

Tuesday, November 19, 2024 –
11:00am to 1:00pm

Event Location:

CSRC Library – 144 Haines Hall

Laura Chávez-Moreno, assistant professor in the departments of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Education, will present her new book examining the pivotal role schools play in shaping concepts of race and Latinidad. How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America (Harvard Education Press, 2024) explores how curriculum, pedagogy, policy, and language interact to define, reinforce, and blur these boundaries, urging us to rethink our understanding of race and recognize Latinx as a racialized groupChavezMoreno-UCLA BookTalk Flyer updated (1)
Discussants:
Dr. Daniel Solórzano and Dr. Celia Lacayo
Moderator:
Dr. Inma García-Sánchez

Please RSVP if you wish to attend a provided lunch.

Book Talk: Dr. Christopher Loperena Presents "The End of Paradise"
2025-02-26 11:00 - 13:00
Book Talk: Dr. Christopher Loperena Presents “The End of Paradise”

Date: Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Time: 11:00am to 1:00pm

Place: CSRC Library – 144 Haines Hall

Christopher Loperena is Associate Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research examines Indigenous and Black territorial struggles, land, extractivism, and the socio-spatial politics of economic development. He has also published on anthropological witnessing and cultural expertise. His book, The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras, is with Stanford University Press. His work has appeared in journals such as American Anthropologist, American Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Geoforum, and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.
Description:
The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country’s northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. He reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority.

[Symposium] Archival Futures: The Ephemera of Art, Mobility and the Isthmus
2025-05-20 08:15 - 18:00 | Hershey Hall, 801 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA invites you to the symposium Archival Futures: The Ephemera of Art, Mobility and the Isthmus. This day-long event will feature scholars, community archivists, artists and intellectuals based in Los Angeles and abroad to deeply engage the archives as those produced and looked after by Central American peoples subjected to historical negation. We ask, in what ways do organic intellectuals, scholarly dissidents, and artists subvert “official archives?” How do they refuse the gaze of violence present in these ephemera and in the future archive? Join us as we create a space of critical and horizontal exchange rooted in many knowledges that exist and make the isthmus, an isthmus that is mobile, that defies ecological collapse, and builds creative worlds of survivance and continuity.
Date: Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Location: Room 158, Hershey Hall Salon (in-person only)
Time: 8:15am-6pm
Lunch & Dinner provided with RSVP at: https://bit.ly/archivalfuture
Art & Archival Exhibit in Hershey Courtyard

2026 CCAS Ph.D. Admission Information Session
2025-11-12 16:00 - 17:00
The Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies is presenting an Admission Information Session for the Ph.D. program. Please help us by sharing our flyer with anyone interested in applying to the Ph.D. Program.

During the Ph.D. information session, we will discuss the admission process and program requirements, and we will answer any questions. Please RSVP using the links provided.

Book Talk: How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America
2025-11-19 11:00
Date: November 19, 2025
Time: 11:oo AM in Pacific Time
RSVP: http://tinyurl.com/bahai-moreno

How do schools make us think about race? And where does Latinx fit in? In “How Schools Make Race,” Laura Chávez-Moreno, a researcher and former public school teacher, shows how schools play a pivotal role in shaping the concept of race and racialized groups. In this talk, she tells the story of how the teachers and students in a racially diverse Spanish-English bilingual education program grappled with conflicting ideas about race and about the Latinx category. Chávez-Moreno challenges us to reconsider what makes race and invites us to see Latinx as a racialized group. Her research reveals why this shift matters-–because how we think about race affects whether our schools can provide youth with an education that challenges racist ideas.

SPEAKER:

Dr. Laura Chávez-Moreno
Assistant Professor, Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies, and Department of Education at UCLA

Laura Chávez-Moreno is an award-winning scholar, qualitative social scientist, and assistant professor in the Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies and the Department of Education at UCLA. She is the author of How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, published by Harvard Education Press, which won the Book of the Year Award by an early career scholar from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. Her book has been featured in several podcasts and popular media, including the New Books Network and Ms. Magazine. Professor Chávez-Moreno’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals and recognized with prestigious awards from organizations such as the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. In 2023, she received the Alan C. Purves Award from the National Council of Teachers of English for her article, “The continuum of racial literacies: Teacher practices countering whitestream bilingual education,” published in Research in the Teaching of English. This annual award honors the article deemed most significant in advancing the field. Most recently, Professor Chávez-Moreno was awarded the 2025 Emerging Scholars Award from the Critical Race Studies in Education Association. For more about her work, please check out her website LauraChavezMoreno.com

Archival Ammunition: Policing, Surveillance, and Gendered Racial Terror in Guatemala
2026-01-08 13:00 - 14:30
Please join us during Week 1 of the Winter quarter for this insightful talk by Postdoctoral Scholar Diana Gamez.

Archival Ammunition: Policing, Surveillance, and Gendered Racial Terror in Guatemala

Thursday, January 8th

1:00 – 2:30 pm

In person at the CSRC Haines Hall 130- UCLA Map linked here

It will also be streamed via zoom:https://ucla.zoom.us/j/99042928908

This talk presents the unsealed Historical National Police Archive (AHPN) in Guatemala as an archive of warfare with a special capacity to police and surveil. Building upon Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s description of archival power “to define what is and what is not a serious object of research and, therefore, of mention,” this talk traces AHPN’s archival power to literally and metaphorically record, compose, select, retain, purge, and police people, particularly women. By theorizing AHPN in this way, its archival capacity is foregrounded as a more hidden form of epistemic violence that spans eras and national frames: namely, the capacity to violently omit and erase alternative processes of social visions, histories, organizing, struggles, memorialization, and the assemblage of state documentation, including evidence of violence.
