March 11, 2004

UCSD To Present Month-Long César E. Chávez Celebration In April

By Jan Jennings

The life and accomplishments of César E. Chávez, labor leader and champion of human rights, will be observed with a month-long series of diverse activities during April at the University of California, San Diego.

Chávez’s birthday is March 31 and he will be honored with celebratory and educational activities at UCSD beginning April 2 and continuing through May 3. All events are free and open to the public.

The principal figure in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, Chávez, and his role as a leader in the struggle for working families and an advocate for non-violent solutions, dignity, and respect for all, will be the guiding thread in a seminar series on the history, present, and future of Chicana/o art, individual lectures, a photographic display, a panel discussion, a cultural celebration, a youth essay contest, and a documentary film.

Lecturers will include award-winning poets and writers, professors of Chicana/o culture and studies, and the associate director for Creativity & Culture at the Rockefeller Foundation.

The five-part seminar series will be held April 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30 from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the UCSD Women’s Center. The April 2 kick-off event will debut the Chicana/o Art of San Diego Catalog, a record of local Chicana/o artists compiled by UCSD students in the undergraduate course, Chicana/o Visual Culture. The presentation of the catalog will be accompanied by an Artists of San Diego Roundtable where 10 of the 13 featured artists will discuss Chicana/o art.

On April 9, Roberto Tejada, assistant professor of art history, theory, and criticism in the UCSD Visual Arts Department, will speak on Loud Image: The Visual Tactics of Luis Gispert. Gispert is a Cuban-American artist working in photography, video, and three-dimensional constructions.

Guisela Latorre, assistant professor of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who specializes in modern and contemporary Chicana/o and Latin American art, will lecture April 16 on Male Crisis: Masculinity, Power and Chicana/o Art, and on April 23, Alicia Arrizón will speak on Performing Space and the ‘Native’ Body in Chicana/o Art. Arrizón is an associate professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her academic interests include contemporary cultural and performance studies.

The April 30 seminar finale will feature Tomás Ybarra Frausto, associate director for Creativity & Culture at the Rockefeller Foundation. He will speak on “The (Re) Generation of Chicana/o Art.” Frausto has written and published extensively, focusing on Latin American and U.S./Latino cultural issues.

Other noted lecturers for the Chávez celebration are poet/writers Jimmy Santiago Baca and Gary Soto.

The UCSD César Chávez Celebration Committee and the Helen Edison Lecture Series will present the award-winning poet, Jimmy Santiago Baca, at 7 p.m. April 20 in the Mandeville Center Recital Hall. Baca will speak on The Power of Dream. Baca is a Chicano activist, a self-taught writer, and a critical voice of contemporary poetry in the Americas. He holds the Wallace Stevens Chair at Yale University and his honors include the National Endowment Poetry Award and the National Hispanic Heritage Award. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and a memoir.

On May 3, poet, novelist, and short story writer Gary Soto will speak on Local News: An Evening with a California Writer at 7:30 p.m. in Copley Auditorium of the Institute of the Americas on the UCSD campus. He is the author of more than 20 books for both adults and children and the editor of Pieces of the Heart: New Chicano Fiction. His honors include an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

A panel discussion, Higher Education Access & Equity for Students from Immigrant/Migrant Worker Families, will be presented at 11:30 a.m. April 16 in the UCSD Cross-Cultural Center. Maria Blanco and Mary T. Hernandez, attorneys specializing in immigrant and education advocacy issues, will lead the discussion.

A documentary film, The Lemon Grove Incident, will be presented at 5 p.m. April 29 at the Cross-Cultural Center. Robert R. Alvarez of the UCSD Department of Ethnic Studies will introduce the film which concerns one of the earliest school desegregation cases in U.S. history.

Other activities in the month-long salute to César E. Chávez include:

• United Farm Workers/César E. Chávez Photographs by Juan Lopez & Carlos Legerrette on view noon to 2 p.m. April 2 at the Cross-Cultural Center. The photographs depict San Diego’s involvement in the United Farm Workers Movement since the 1960s.
• Art, Community, and Action, an evening of grass-roots art and music, 6 p.m., April 8, the Cross-Cultural Center.
• The High School Essay Contest Awards Presentation and Breakfast, 7:30 a.m., April 9, San Diego Convention Center. The essay theme is César E. Chávez: A model of self-sacrifice in a time of struggle.
• Teatro Izcalli performing political one-act plays, 6 p.m., April 12, Cross-Cultural Center.
• The 26th annual Cultural Celebration, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., April 17, UCSD’s Thurgood Marshall College. Features music, dance, food, and art from around the world.

Jorge Mariscal, director of the UCSD Chicana/o-Latina/o Arts and Humanities Program, and Cecil Lytle, provost of Thurgood Marshall College, are co-chairing the César E. Chávez Celebration Planning Committee. Community activist Olivia Puentes-Reynolds is an honorary co-chair. For more information visit the web site at http://blink.ucsd.edu/go/chavez or call (858) 534-9689.

Media Contacts: Pat JaCoby, (858) 534-7404, pjacoby@ucsd.edu or
Jan Jennings, (858) 822-1684, jnjennings@ucsd.edu (858) 534-3624