Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Relational Histories, Inter-Ethnic Alliances: Chican@/x Coalition Politics in Tejas


I'm happy to announce this year's NACCS Tejas Foco Conference taking place at 
Texas A & M University College Station.  Among other influences—including the attack on Mexican American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District in Arizona—Texas' (re)birth of Xican@/Mexican American Studies Movement happened here with our NACCS Tejas Foco scholars and community.  We're connected across the state, continue to work with and lead the REST Coalition that defeated the racist textbook that was under consideration by the SBOE #RejectTheText, conduct research, write books and textbooks, co-construct curriculum, grow our own teachers and otherwise celebrate this opportunity to be a part of something that is at once so much bigger than ourselves and incredibly nurturing and fulfilling.  So please join us if you want to help advance the cause for curricular inclusion in our state's classrooms.  Open to the public.  All are welcome.
Register for conference HERE.  

Note:  Papers deadline for NACCS Tejas Foco 2017 has been extended to Dec 8, 5pm. Please consider submitting a proposal (paper, panel, roundtable, etc.)
Angela Valenzuela
c/s
NACCS TEJAS FOCO 2017
February 23-25, 2017
#naccstejas2017 


 
Memorial Student Center (MSC) 
275 Joe Routt Blvd, College Station, TX 77843

Facebook Announcement HERE.



The conference situates race as a starting point for examining the multiple oppressions that have governed life in Texas. It builds on the idea that citizenship, sexuality, gender, labor organizing, class, pop culture, politics, and religion serve as modalities through which race is lived and performed in Texas.
Chican@/x Studies is an expansive and growing field. Our collective histories, our testimonios, offer stories of Mexican and Mexican American life in Texas that illuminate the broader realities of racism, heterosexism, violence, colonialism, and extreme nationalisms. As Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, we have a history that has struggled alongside other aggrieved groups and pushed back against the indignities of an unequal and oppressive system, even as the  irregular political ground that has rooted these movements has challenged notions of a collective “we.” There is an urgency today for scholarship to reflect the history of inter-ethnic organizing, to better explain the ways racism manifests itself and how it is sustained and/or promoted in Texas, and how Chican@/x communities—from El Paso to Dallas/Fort Worth to the Rio Grande Valley—continue to be engaged in political and artistic struggles to combat precisely such racism. It is the historical struggle that reflects the dignity, quest for justice, and the soul of the Chican@/x community.
 Dr. Rogelio Saenz is this year's keynote speaker: 
His research focuses on the intersection between demography, social inequality, and race and ethnicity. In particular, my work focuses on topics related to Latina/os, immigration, ethnic identity, poverty, labor markets, education, health, and aging. His recent research has addressed issues related to the rise of immigrant detention centers and the establishment of the immigration-industrial complex, the health of elderly Mexican immigrants living in the United States and Mexico; poverty dynamics along the Texas-Mexico border and the Lower Mississippi Delta region; Latina/o settlements in new-destination areas; and Latina/o human rights.

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