Movidas: Latino Studies 1970 — Now

710 West Cesar Chavez Street,Austin TX 78701

08 April, 2022

Description

This open and free conference will bring the community and the university together to center Latino communities in our national dialogues. Where do we go from here? This conference celebrates an important anniversary while it also prioritizes the complex challenges Latinxs must confront right now. Fifty years since the establishment of the Center for Mexican American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and similar Latino Studies departments across the country, here’s what we still face: anti-immigrant politics and migrant children in cages, rising Covid-19 mortalities and health vulnerabilities, gender discrimination and homophobia, educational inequities and digital divides, ableism and environmental racism, disproportionate poverty and workplace discrimination, persistent segregation and substandard housing, and police brutality and white supremacist state violence. These issues, familiar and yet different, require action. Collective action. This open and free conference will bring the community and the university together to center Latino communities in our national dialogues, and celebrate the work of those before us, while also urging the creation of movidas, or movements, for the future. So join us for two days of conversations y preguntas, quotable moments, performance protests, artmaking con ganas, taqueria activism, and everything in between, as we call on past activism to inform the fight for civil rights now and explore the variety of grassroots movidas that can work together to create positive change for today.