cynthiavazquezphd
Latino Youth Leadership Conference Oral History Project
2023 (NV)
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Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Project Oral History
2024 (CA)
Dr. Luisa Ortega, Cynthia Vazquez, Anel Rojas, Dr. Maria Chairez, Abigail A. Marroquin
Yolanda de Herrera​
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This co-collaborative project with Anel Rojas, doctoral student, alumni, and organizer, from Higher Education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. We are working on a oral history project tracing the origins of the Latino Youth Leadership Conference (LYLC) and its results on Latinx high school students over the last 28 years in the Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference was a first of its kind program focused on Latinx specific needs and cultural understandings as a form of resilience to increase the high school to university pipeline. We interrogate the roles of educational and business institutions and what it means to “serve Latino students”? From this project we will create an archive for our community, direct a documentary, and lead a museum exhibit.
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From our initial project, Anel and I, have extended to conduct an oral history project with LYLC sister conference Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Project (CLYLP) based in California.
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And, in April of 2024, in a historic moment, LYLC Program Director, Abigail A. Marroquin and CLYLP Executive Director, Dr. Luisa Ortega, along with the co-founder o both Dr. Maria Chairez joined us at the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) for a roundtable to discuss both conferences legacies and futurities.
Dr. Luisa Ortega, Dr. Maria Chairez, and Abigail A. Marroquin
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XoQUE Art in Motion Trans-Decolonial Interventions on the U.S./Mexico Border, National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), Minneapolis, MN
2022
XoQue Retreat
January 29, 2022
Ensenada, Mexico
Members: Dr. Berenice Badillo, Jennifer Clay, Ana Maria Herrera, Selina Lugo, Sandra Carmona, Cynthia Vazquez
This paper is situated on the U.S./Mexico border, traces an art collective’s origin story of a group of Indigenous, Chicana, and Mejicana women artists who are now challenging the ongoing Indigenous dispossessions on the border. Their community work is grounded in community building, with the local and land stewards of San Diego—Tijuana region. The art collective actively worked with Kumeyaay community on both sides of the border to create decolonial and feminist art as a direct action against the ongoing state surveillance of border tribes. Their art re-imagines and opens for the possibility of another world.