February 23, 2004

Crossing Borders: 2nd Annual Ethnic Studies Conference
Presented By UC San Diego's California Cultures Initiative

By Patricia Quill

Every day, people of color are crossing borders, building communities, and forging new possibilities in increasingly hostile conditions. In this context, citizenship, social justice, and culture take on new meaning, particularly as our nation—and as the state of California—undergoes dramatic demographic and political transformations.

Crossing Borders: the 2nd Annual Conference of Ethnic Studies in California will explore these and other issues when the conference takes place on the University of California, San Diego campus on March 5 and 6, 2004. The conference is co-sponsored by the UCSD’s Department of Ethnic Studies, California Cultures in Comparative Perspective and Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity; as well as the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California; and the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The Crossing Borders conference is a chance for graduate students from around California to present their research to an audience of peers, mentors, and the public,” says David Pellow, director of California Cultures and conference organizer. “The topics featured range from studies of U.S./Mexico border conflicts to research on the representation of immigrants and people of color in the film industry, and examinations of the continuing struggle for civil rights in education, employment, and in community politics. The research consciously links cutting edge academic theories to real world concerns and is accessible to a broad audience. Students and faculty from the leading Ethnic and American Studies departments in the nation will be present and UCSD is proud to host this prestigious conference.”

Organized around the work of Ph.D. students at each of the sponsoring programs, the conference will focus on research that speaks critically to questions of citizenship, social justice, and/or culture.

Crossing Border's Conference Keynote Speaker: Professor and activist Haunani-Kay Trask.

Keynote speaker for Crossing Borders will be activist and University of Hawai-Manoa professor Haunani-Kay Trask, an indigenous leader in the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement. She has represented her nation at the United Nations in Geneva, at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa (2001), and at various gatherings throughout the Pacific, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. She has authored four books, including From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i, widely considered a masterpiece of contemporary resistance writing. Trask was co-producer and scriptwriter of the award-winning documentary, Act of War: The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation in 1993. In 1998-99, she was a Fellow with the Pacific-Basin Research Center affiliated with the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Los Alacranes, one San Diego's most beloved group of musicians, will perform on the closing evening of the conference. The pride of San Diego's Mexican-American community, Los Alacranes, founded in 1977 by Ramon "Chunky" Sanchez and his brother Ricardo along with Don "Güero" Knapp and Miguel Lopez, describe their music as "Southwest-Chicano-Mexican-Barrio folklore." (http://www.losalacranes.com).

The conference will also include presentations by nationally renowned scholars Yen Espiritu, Ramon Gutierrez, Alberto Pulido, Michael Omi, George Sanchez, and among others.

California Cultures in Comparative Perspectives is a research initiate of UCSD that supports creative, interdisciplinary research, teaching and collaborations among faculty, students and the public. The initiative explores the broad implications of the history and current growth of the state’s people of color and immigrant populations.

For more information about the conference, go to http://ethnicstudies.ucsd.edu/crossingborders/. For more information about UCSD’s California Cultures in Comparative Perspectives, go to http://calcultures.ucsd.edu/index.php.

Media Contact: Patricia Quill, (858) 822-0661

CROSSING BORDERS: 2ND ANNUAL ETHNIC STUDIES CONFERENCE PRESENTED BY UC SAN DIEGO’S CALIFORNIA CULTURES INITIATIVE