Two upcoming talks will be presented by the Cal State San Bernardino History Club/Phi Alpha Theta. The first event on Wednesday, May 22, “Chicana/o Studies Now!: Student Activism at UCLA & California’s Racial Climate in the 1990s,” will be presented with the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship in the John M. Pfau Library, room PL-5005 beginning at noon. The talk will be given by José M. Aguilar-Hernández, assistant professor of ethnic and women’s studies at Cal Poly Pomona. Aguilar-Hernández’s presentation will focus on a student-led social movement that demanded Chicana/o Studies at UCLA campus between 1990-1993. Using archival documents and more than 70 oral histories, Aguilar-Hernández will discuss the strategies that students used including vigils, letter campaigns, a sit-in, and a hunger strike. He will also analyze the significance of this social movement during the 1990s in California, a decade of tense racial climate for immigrants and people of color. The presentation offers historical lessons from UCLA and the 1990s for current racial justice efforts in higher education. The second presentation on Wednesday, May 29, 'Sequin Archives: Memories of Space, Migration, and Style in Queer Latinx Los Angeles,' will take place in the Pfau Library, room PL-4005, at 2 p.m. The talk will be given by Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., assistant professor in the Departments of Women, Gender and Sexuality studies and at Portland State University in Oregon. Alvarez’s presentation is based on is book project, “Finding Sequins in the Rubble: Mapping Queer Latinx Los Angeles,” and weaves together Jotería stories and journeys of love, loss and desire. Drawing on oral histories, archives, fashion and poetry, Alvarez maps queer Latinx Los Angeles and unlikely spaces of survival and celebration. Through a method Alvarez calls “finding sequins in the rubble” about everyday practices of belonging and resistance, he co-constructs an archive of ephemeral and material content of songs, sequins, memories, bus tickets and altars. Both talks are free and open to the public. Parking at CSUSB is $6. Funding for these events comes from the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Program and the CSUSB Department of History.
