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Honors Colloquium & Senior Awards (2024)

The UCSB Department of Chicana/o Studies was thrilled

Cumpleañera Series: Dr. Nicholas Centino

Cumpleañera Series: CH ST 1C (Spring 2024)

April 2-8: AfroChicanx Digital Humantities Project at UCSB

AfroChicanx Digital Humantities Project at UCSB

Tuesday, April 2 at 5pm:

"Afro-Chicanx Digital Humanities Project: Memories, Narratives, and Oppositional Consciousness of Black Diasporas" Panel with the Professors Dora Car

In solidarity with Black Studies Faculty, Students

The Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies stands in firm solidarity with our colleagues in the Department of Black Studies in their statement and their call to protest UCSB’s failure to protect our students and freedom of expression.

We express our deep concern with the harassment that many students, faculty, and staff have confronted in the past months in discussing the Israeli government’s human rights abuses and violence in Palestine. We want to make it clear that we do not condone anti-semitism, and that critiquing and protesting the government of Israel is not equivalent to anti-semitism. To racialize and dehumanize others, to strip us of human rights by referring to us as “terrorists,” “illegals,” “savage,” and “primitives,” is a common tool of settler colonial logics to justify genocide and displacement.

We are deeply alarmed that many of our undergraduate and graduate students have been and continue to be doxed and harassed online. Our concerns for their personal safety led our department to take the difficult but necessary decision to temporarily remove our graduate student’s profiles from our webpage during Fall quarter, as it contained their photos and names. In the case of our graduate students, this impacts them in various ways as they are unable to use our department webpage to network and make their crucial work visible. Moreover, potential graduate students for our program see that we had to remove our students’ photos, names, and emails. This has prevented them from easily contacting our graduate students, while giving them the sense that UCSB is not a safe space for critical thinking and academic freedom. This situation alone illustrates the harsh reality and insecurity graduate students, undergraduate students, staff, faculty, and visitors are all confronting at UCSB.

Recently, undergraduate student staff at the MCC have been doxed online; in one list almost all were women of color. Several of these students are majoring in Chicana/o Studies. Some have stated that the students’ legal status has been published online. Deeply alarming, these students are put at risk for further harassment and harm.

Our department was created by Black and Brown student activists who sought to create a better future through education. We, students and faculty, have since been at the forefront of internationalist struggles and academic freedom in pursuit of social justice. For decades, our students have engaged in protests, hunger strikes, sit-ins, and international solidarity movements, often at great risk; today they carry on that legacy of speaking truth to power. It should alarm the administration that undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty across UCSB do not consider themselves secure on campus because of their solidarity with the people of Palestine, who are currently undergoing violence, displacement, and starvation by the government of Israel. It is a reminder that the struggle continues.

Moreover, we strongly condemn the recent mounting use of force by university enforcement across UC and college campuses nationally on campus communities. Their activism and encampments call attention to the mass violence against Palestinian communities. As scholars, we are also deeply concerned about the destruction of higher institutions of learning in Gaza, what experts at the United Nations aptly calls scholasticide; defined as the “systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students, and staff and the destruction of educational infrastructures.”

In solidarity,

Some concerned faculty of Chicana and Chicano Studies

[Updated from letter originally posted on March 7, 2024]

Horacio Roque Ramirez Memorial Symposium

The Horacio Roque Ramirez Memorial Symposium will feature speakers who will honor the life and legacy of Professor Horacio Roque Ramirez (1969-2015).

Dr. Roque Ramirez was a faculty member in the Department of Chicana/o Studies who passed December 2015. His ethnographic and archival research focused on Central Americans in the US, queer Latinx community life in San Francisco, and Latino sexuality and hope in an era of AIDS and deportation. At UCSB, he developed the courses “Central Americans in the U.S.” and “Salvadoran Diasporas”, among the first within the UC system. Read More

Associate Professor William Calvo Quiroz book talk "Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions" (Oxoford University Press, 2022)

On February 23, 2004, with a stellar group of faculty at the MCC, a two hour symposium was held to introduce the first doctoral program in Chicana and Chicano Studies.

In Fall 2005, the the first cohort of doctoral students arrived at UCSB. Almost twenty years later to the day, one of our distinguished alum, Associate Professor William Calvo-Quirós, retorna to give a presentation on his award-winning book, Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions (Oxoford University Press, 2022).

Professor Calvo-Quirós' presentation is one of the events commemorating the 20th anniversary of the first doctoral program in the nation to focus on Chicanas/os/x. We are beyond proud to sponsor a series of events this year and next highlighting the academic accomplishments of our doctoral graduates.

The Current at UCSB: Compendium on Chicano poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera strikes gold

The Current at UCSB published an article featuring Professor Emeritus Francisco Lomelí

Read the Article

All News

Honors Colloquium & Senior Awards (2024)

Cumpleañera Series: Dr. Nicholas Centino

Cumpleañera Series: CH ST 1C (Spring 2024)

April 2-8: AfroChicanx Digital Humantities Project at UCSB

AfroChicanx Digital Humantities Project at UCSB

In solidarity with Black Studies Faculty, Students

Horacio Roque Ramirez Memorial Symposium

Associate Professor William Calvo Quiroz book talk "Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions" (Oxoford University Press, 2022)

The Current at UCSB: Compendium on Chicano poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera strikes gold

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