Yakima Valley College’s Chican@ Studies program will host the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies’ (NACCS) Pacific Northwest Foco Fall 2024 Conference, “Unyielding Legacies: 500+ Years of Organizing, Acting Our Dreams and Crafting Futures.” The conference will be held November 9, 2024, in YVC’s Kaminski Conference Center, 1704 W. Nob Hill Blvd., Building #38.

The free event is open to the public and includes workshops, panel presentations, and creative activities that will examine and explore contemporary and historical resistance practices within the Chicano/a community.

NACCS serves academic programs, departments and research centers that focus on issues pertaining to Mexican Americans, Chicana/os and Latina/os. Formed in 1972, during the height of the Chicano movement, NACCS worked to develop space where scholarship and Chicana/o students could develop their talents in higher education. For more than 30 years, students, faculty, staff and community members have attended the NACCS conferences around the country.

About the Keynote Speakers

Yesenia Hunter is an assistant professor of history at Heritage University, located on the traditional lands of the Yakama People. Her work centers the braided histories of immigrants and settlers and their impact on Indigenous peoples. Her work is guided by the question: How do people make place and create rhythms of belonging in fragile spaces? The aesthetics of her work are guided by elements of place, memory, embodied practices, and relationality. Along with her scholarly work, Yesenia and the Hunter Family explore questions of belonging through what they call "Hunter Gatherings,” events that invite others to participate in dialogue and making.

Josué Q. Estrada is an associate professor of history at Central Washington University. His research interests include race, empire, migration, politics, voting rights and citizenship. He’s currently working on a book that explores how Puerto Ricans and later Chicanas/os mobilized through distinct organizational and political tactics to claim citizenship rights, specifically by invoking race strategically to reshape race and politics in the United States. He is also a collaborator for the digital history project called Mapping American Social Movements that explores how social movements have influenced American life and politics in the 20th century.

Antonia Castañeda is professor emeritus of history at St. Mary's University. Born in Crystal City, Texas and raised in the Yakima Valley, Castañeda received her PhD in history from Stanford University, representing one of the first Chicana graduate students in the program. She held faculty positions at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Texas, Austin before joining the history department at St. Mary's. She is the author of many publications within the field of Chicana/o Studies. In addition, she is a founding member of the scholarly organization Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social, and co-editor of the Chicana Matters Series at University of Texas Press.

Event Schedule

8:30 a.m.
Registration/Snacks/Music and Poetry

9 – 10 a.m.
Welcome and Opening Address

10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
Concurrent Sessions

  • Panel 1 – On Memory and Practice: Quinceñera in the Modern Era…; Combating Hegemonic Memory…
  • Panel 2 – Entre Familia: Chola y Cholo Political Impact on Family Resistance
  • Panel 3 – Grass Roots Organizing and Community Empowerment
  • Workshop 1 – The Importance of Employment-Based Immigration Option for DACA Recipients

11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Co-Keynotes – Yesenia Navarrete Hunter, history instructor at Heritage University and Josue Estrada, history instructor at Central Washington University

12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Lunch Break and Nerdy Scavenger Hunt

1:30 – 2:30 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions

  • Panel 4 – Teaching as resistance in the first ever Chicanx & Latinx Studies Major in the PNW
  • Panel 5 – Homegirl Pedagogy: La Chola in the Classroom and Community
  • Panel 6 – Mezcla Collective Panel
  • Workshop 2 – Boxing using stories: Creating counter stories as counterpunches to challenge systems of oppression

 2:45 – 3:45 p.m.
Keynote Address: Antonia Castaneda, emeritus history professor  

4 – 5 p.m.
Concurrent Sessions

  • Panel 7 – Bodies on the Line: “Velar por la salud de los nuestros…”; “The Lynching of Mexicans in the American West…”
  • Workshop 3 – Organizing an Ethnic Studies Youth Conference: From a Conference to a Movement
  • Workshop 4 – Listening, Narrating, Archiving Women’s Stories Through Oral History

5 – 6 p.m.
Despedida and Raffle

For more information contact YVC Chican@ Studies & Sociology Instructor Maria Cuevas at 509-574-6800 x3151 or mcuevas@yvcc.edu.