FOR XICANA[X] INDIGENOUS THOUGHT, ART AND SOCIAL PRAXIS
An Engaged Public Research Institute
in the Division of Humanities & Fine Arts
and the Division of Social Sciences
University of California, Santa Barbara
FOR XICANA[X] INDIGENOUS THOUGHT, ART AND SOCIAL PRAXIS
An Engaged Public Research Institute
in the Division of Humanities & Fine Arts
and the Division of Social Sciences
University of California, Santa Barbara
Las Maestras Center recognizes and honors the Coastal Chumash people, the traditional custodians of Anisq’oyo, the land where at UCSB we teach, work and make home. We say: “It is a privilege to come to know you and we thank you for your daily example of wise stewardship. We acknowledge your living elders and those who have walked this earth before you. May our relationship grow together in shared purpose and vision."
Las Maestras Center’s multi-disciplinary programming blends visual, performance and literary arts to inform an aesthetic and a directed intention in the creative process, which return artists to their home cultures and contemporary communities of common cause.
I write this “despedida” in what is for so many the worst of times. I admit that any youthful vision I once carried of a world (of nations) liberated from its deadly trajectory of hate and greed has long vanished. Perhaps my growing despair began as early as the turn into the 21st century with the U.S. response to 9/11, ceaseless war predictably waiting in rubble. Then, well into the second decade, we witness the Trump’s separation of families at the border— the unthinkable reenacted. Today, in the third, it is genocide in Palestine.
Borders are always culpably at work here. Nation-state ideologies and their ideologues drive a bloody knife-edged wedge between and among a people. And the people always lose. Death is so profoundly intimate; it can be never truly avenged. So, one writes any way. Not in retaliation, but in lament, the grief beneath the mask of rage and hatred. And, perhaps in that truth, resides hope in our capacity to continue feeling in the face of so much loss and in our insistence on expressing it.
(Continues . . .)
This digital collection is a working archive of projects, events and curated spaces that Las Maestras Center has put together since our conception in 2017-18. Although only officially established at UCSB a few short years ago, this digital archive is testimony to and spans the work done before our official opening and the work we have yet to do. It is a living space in time where we welcome all to engage with the bodies of art, words and politica.