CCAS Talk by Dr. Francisco J. Galarte: "Dolorous Gender"
2024-04-22 14:00 - 15:30 UTC | Haines Hall, 144
We cordially invite you to a CCAS Talk by Dr. Francisco J. Galarte:
Title: “Dolorous Gender”
Abstract: This lecture builds upon the work in Brown Transfiguration: Rethinking Race, Sex, Gender and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies by proposing the affect of dolor as a conceptual framework for analyzing and theorizing the psycho-sexual affective registers of racialized femininities and masculinities. While demonstrating the connections between trans studies and Chicanx/Latinx studies, the talk focuses on the lives of trans feminine sex workers on the Juárez/El Paso Border before NAFTA and the dolorous imprints these women have left upon how we understand the region’s response to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1990s, via border policing, feminicide and urban renewal. The photographic work of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles provides a dolorous point of entry for excavating a history of trans-feminization on the border by both the US and Mexican nation states, as well as the extractive colonial imaginings of feminist researchers.
Biography: Francisco J. Galarte is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Director of the Feminist Research Institute at the University of New Mexico, and currently serves as the executive editor of the journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke Univ Press). He is the author of Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies (University of Texas Press, 2021), which was awarded the Allan Bray Memorial Book Prize, by the MLA GL/Q Caucus (2022), the John Leo and Dana Heller Award by the Popular Culture Association (2022), and the Book of the Year Award by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (2022). Most recently, he has begun working on a second book project tentatively entitled, Dolorous Gender: The Problem of Chicanx/Latinx Femininities and Masculinities.
Date: Monday, April 22th, 2024
Time: 2:00 – 3:30 pm
Location: Haines Hall, 144

Gallery Talk: Patrick A. Polk and Charlene Villaseñor Black
2024-10-25 17:30 - 19:30
IN PERSON- RSVP, please click here
The Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies is pleased to co-sponsor a gallery talk at the Fowler Museum featuring Professor of Art History and Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Associate Director of the Chicano Studies Research Center Charlene Villaseñor Black and Lilly Endowment Curator of Art and Religion Patrick A. Polk. Illuminating commentary on the exhibition Descanse en Paz: Memorial Paintings from 19th-Century Mexico will be paired with light refreshments in the courtyard.
This exhibition highlights two popular genres of 19th-century Mexican painting commemorating family members who no longer reside in the household— offering them a lasting presence in the home. The first intimately portrays deceased individuals in likenesses imbued with grief and tender remembrance. The subjects—often children—are shown full of life: some appear with toys in hand; others rest in peace (descanse en paz). The second genre is the uniquely Mexican monja coronada or “crowned nun” portrait. Images of flower-adorned “Brides of Christ” were commissioned by the families of women who took Catholic ecclesiastical vows and permanently embarked on cloistered lives.
The event will take place on Friday, October 25 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm. All are welcome to attend. For more information and to RSVP, please click here. To visit this event’s page, please click here.

UCLA CCAS Ph.D. Admission Information Sessions - October 30 and November 4th
2024-10-30 09:30 - 15:00
The Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies is presenting two remote Admission Information Sessions on the Ph.D. program.
During the Ph.D. information session, we will discuss the admission process and program requirements. Please RSVP using the links provided.
2025 CCAS Ph.D. Admissions Information Sessions
Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Time 9:30 am -11:00am
ZOOM RSVP: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwsduyqpzgjG9XCZajGm686f-wJRWjaRRRy
Date : Monday, November 4, 2024
Time : 3:00 pm-4:30 pm
ZOOM RSVP https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkc-msrjguH9DTB2csoSGjrLepJI5hMvpt
Admissions Deadlines for Fall 2025: December 1, 2024
Admission Requirements Website: https://grad.ucla.edu/programs/social-sciences/chicana-o-and-central-american-studies-department/chicana-and-chicano-studies/#admission-requirements
For any questions, please email Janeth Ruvalcaba, the Graduate Advisor, at janeth@ccas.ucla.edu

Dia de Los Muertos- November 3, 2024 at 5pm
2024-11-03 17:00 - 20:30
Join us on November 3rd, from 5:00-8:30 pm, for Dia De Los Muertos. Guided by Professor Martha Ramirez-Oropeza.
Location: 685 N Venice Blvd, Venice, CA, 90291

Book Talk: Laura Chávez-Moreno Presents "How Schools Make Race"
2024-11-19 11:00 - 13:00
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
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 14:00 - 15:30
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

Professor Gaspar de Alba Retirement Symposium
2026-02-26 09:00 - 19:00 | Northwest Campus Auditorium
RSVP Link
Please join us for a celebration of Profe Gaspar De Alba’s incredible career and lasting legacy at UCLA. Let’s celebrate her research and impact!
Hosted by the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities in partnership with the Dean of Social Sciences and the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, “Queering Sor Juana” will include two panels and a showcase performance of arias from the opera JUANA, which is based on Gaspar de Alba’s historical novel, Sor Juana’s Second Dream. The opera premiered with Opera UCLA in 2019, with two sold-out performances and a glowing review in The Los Angeles Times.
Free and open to the public, but all attendees must register online. Lunch and reception will be provided for the participants and first 50 registered guests only.
“Otro Corazón 3: Queering Sor Juana” builds on past symposia organized by Alicia Gaspar de Alba in her “Corazón” series,1 and is offered as part of a year-long celebration of her 32-year academic career at UCLA, focusing on her lifetime of research and creative engagement with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century Mexican nun/poet/scholar who is hailed all over the world as the “first feminist of the Americas” and the Mexican “Tenth Muse.”

CCAS 2026 Commencement
2026-06-13 10:00 - 12:00 | UCLA Sunset Village, Covel Commons
The faculty and staff of the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies look forward to celebrating our Class of 2026 Commencement, Doctoral Hooding Ceremony, and M.A. Commencement.
The Department Ceremony will be held on Saturday, June 13, 2026. Doors will open at 9:00 a.m., and the ceremony will take place from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
More information coming soon!
