Please join us to celebrate the campus opening of Las Maestras Center. Sponsored by the Department of English and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.

• 3:30 La Puerta Abierta
  • Our door officially opens
  • Antojitos (appetizers and conversacíon)
• 4:00 Bienvenidos
  • Welcoming by Maestras Celia Herrera Rodríguez and Cherríe Moraga
  • Opening oracíon – Honoring los 4 elementos
  • Remarks from Dean John Majewski and other invited Guests
• 5:00 La VisiónGoals and hopes for Las Maestras Center – in conversation with campus community
• 5:15 Música, Postre (dessert), Mas Conversación

As UCSB is now a “Hispanic” serving Institution, we are enthusiastically responding in kind from a Xicana Indigenous perspective. Las Maestras Center’s purpose, as we see it, is to help Latinxs remember their origins through the act of art making and critical collective thought. In our many decades of teaching and art practice, we have witnessed over and over again, that through public pedagogy, young people become empowered to create a literature, a theater, a visual rendering and a daily social practice that counters the societal impoverishment and cultural amnesia of globalization. It’s the most and best that we, as teachers and artists, have to give.

– Cherríe Moraga and Celia Herrera Rodríguez