Book Talk: Dr. Christopher Loperena Presents "The End of Paradise"
2025-02-26 11:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Book Talk: Dr. Christopher Loperena Presents “The End of Paradise”

Date: Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Time: 11:00am to 1:00pm

Place: CSRC Library – 144 Haines Hall

Christopher Loperena is Associate Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research examines Indigenous and Black territorial struggles, land, extractivism, and the socio-spatial politics of economic development. He has also published on anthropological witnessing and cultural expertise. His book, The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras, is with Stanford University Press. His work has appeared in journals such as American Anthropologist, American Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Geoforum, and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.
Description:
The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country’s northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. He reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority.

[Symposium] Archival Futures: The Ephemera of Art, Mobility and the Isthmus
2025-05-20 08:15 - 18:00 | Hershey Hall, 801 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
The Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA invites you to the symposium Archival Futures: The Ephemera of Art, Mobility and the Isthmus. This day-long event will feature scholars, community archivists, artists and intellectuals based in Los Angeles and abroad to deeply engage the archives as those produced and looked after by Central American peoples subjected to historical negation. We ask, in what ways do organic intellectuals, scholarly dissidents, and artists subvert “official archives?” How do they refuse the gaze of violence present in these ephemera and in the future archive? Join us as we create a space of critical and horizontal exchange rooted in many knowledges that exist and make the isthmus, an isthmus that is mobile, that defies ecological collapse, and builds creative worlds of survivance and continuity.
Date: Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Location: Room 158, Hershey Hall Salon (in-person only)
Time: 8:15am-6pm
Lunch & Dinner provided with RSVP at: https://bit.ly/archivalfuture
Art & Archival Exhibit in Hershey Courtyard

2026 CCAS Ph.D. Admission Information Session
2025-11-12 16:00 - 17:00
The Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies is presenting an Admission Information Session for the Ph.D. program. Please help us by sharing our flyer with anyone interested in applying to the Ph.D. Program.

During the Ph.D. information session, we will discuss the admission process and program requirements, and we will answer any questions. Please RSVP using the links provided.

Book Talk: How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America
2025-11-19 11:00
Date: November 19, 2025
Time: 11:oo AM in Pacific Time
RSVP: http://tinyurl.com/bahai-moreno

How do schools make us think about race? And where does Latinx fit in? In “How Schools Make Race,” Laura Chávez-Moreno, a researcher and former public school teacher, shows how schools play a pivotal role in shaping the concept of race and racialized groups. In this talk, she tells the story of how the teachers and students in a racially diverse Spanish-English bilingual education program grappled with conflicting ideas about race and about the Latinx category. Chávez-Moreno challenges us to reconsider what makes race and invites us to see Latinx as a racialized group. Her research reveals why this shift matters-–because how we think about race affects whether our schools can provide youth with an education that challenges racist ideas.

SPEAKER:

Dr. Laura Chávez-Moreno
Assistant Professor, Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies, and Department of Education at UCLA

Laura Chávez-Moreno is an award-winning scholar, qualitative social scientist, and assistant professor in the Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies and the Department of Education at UCLA. She is the author of How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, published by Harvard Education Press, which won the Book of the Year Award by an early career scholar from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. Her book has been featured in several podcasts and popular media, including the New Books Network and Ms. Magazine. Professor Chávez-Moreno’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals and recognized with prestigious awards from organizations such as the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation. In 2023, she received the Alan C. Purves Award from the National Council of Teachers of English for her article, “The continuum of racial literacies: Teacher practices countering whitestream bilingual education,” published in Research in the Teaching of English. This annual award honors the article deemed most significant in advancing the field. Most recently, Professor Chávez-Moreno was awarded the 2025 Emerging Scholars Award from the Critical Race Studies in Education Association. For more about her work, please check out her website LauraChavezMoreno.com

Professor Gaspar de Alba Retirement Symposium
2026-02-26 09:00 - 19:00 | Northwest Campus Auditorium, 350 De Neve Dr., Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1559, United States
RSVP Link
Please join us for a celebration of Profe Gaspar De Alba’s incredible career and lasting legacy at UCLA. Let’s celebrate her research and impact!
Hosted by the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities in partnership with the Dean of Social Sciences and the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, “Queering Sor Juana” will include two panels and a showcase performance of arias from the opera JUANA, which is based on Gaspar de Alba’s historical novel, Sor Juana’s Second Dream. The opera premiered with Opera UCLA in 2019, with two sold-out performances and a glowing review in The Los Angeles Times.
Free and open to the public, but all attendees must register online. Lunch and reception will be provided for the participants and first 50 registered guests only.
“Otro Corazón 3: Queering Sor Juana” builds on past symposia organized by Alicia Gaspar de Alba in her “Corazón” series,1 and is offered as part of a year-long celebration of her 32-year academic career at UCLA, focusing on her lifetime of research and creative engagement with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century Mexican nun/poet/scholar who is hailed all over the world as the “first feminist of the Americas” and the Mexican “Tenth Muse.”

CCAS 2026 Commencement
2026-06-13 10:00 - 12:00 | UCLA Sunset Village, Covel Commons
The faculty and staff of the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies look forward to celebrating our Class of 2026 Commencement, Doctoral Hooding Ceremony, and M.A. Commencement.
The Department Ceremony will be held on Saturday, June 13, 2026. Doors will open at 9:00 a.m., and the ceremony will take place from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
More information coming soon!
