Events By Quarter
Opening Reception: Tuesday, January 16th, 6 pm
La Hija de Jardineros / The Gardeners’ Daughter Alexandra “Lexx” Valdez
MCC Lounge
Alexandra “Lexx” Valdez is a Xicana creative who believes in collective growth through a transformative and sustainable creative process. Raised in the small agricultural town of Guadalupe, California, Lexx earned her BFA in Graphic Design from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Lexx’s style can be characterized by its photo-collage aesthetic and the bold colors that she uses to create vibrantly-illustrated worlds that aim to uplift ancestral knowledge. In La Hija de Jardineros, Lexx Valdez presents a collection of digital collages that have been inspired by ancestral knowledge and the earth that grows it.
Living Lives of Resilient Love in a Time of Hate
Free-Dem Foundations: From Wrongful Incarceration to Community Mobilization Jerome Morgan
MCC Theater
Jerome Morgan was wrongly convicted and served a total of twenty years in Angola Prison before being found innocent with the help of the Innocence Project. He will speak about his life before incarceration, fighting for freedom inside Angola Prison, and his work with Students at the Center and Youth Activism. Free-Dem Foundations is a non-profit community based youth organization that partners with local businesses and nonprofit organizations (primarily formerly incarcerated business owners and activists) to empower New Orleans’ area youth.
Cup of Culture
Dolores
MCC Theater
“Dolores, a documentary, extols Dolores Huerta's lifelong, and seemingly unlimited, fighting spirit in the service of workers’ rights”. - The NYTimes
Dolores Huerta is among the most important, yet least known, activists in American history. An equal partner in co-founding the first farm workers unions with Cesar Chavez, her enormous contributions have gone largely unrecognized. Dolores tirelessly led the fight for racial and labor justice alongside Chavez, becoming one of the most defiant feminists of the twentieth century—and she continues the fight to this day, at 87. With intimate and unprecedented access to this intensely private mother to eleven, the film reveals the raw, personal stakes involved in committing one’s life to social change. Dr. Rebeca Mireles Rios, Professor at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education, will lead a post-film discussion immediately following the film. 1h 35 min.
Living Lives of Resilient Love in a Time of Hate
Teaching in/from Freedom. Supporting Undocumented Students and Their Families in the Classroom and Beyond Lorgia García-Peña
MCC Theater
Lorgia García-Peña is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction (Duke University Press 2016). This book reveals how the stories of a nation create marginality through acts of exclusion. It was awarded 2017 National Women Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize, the 2016 LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies. In 2003, García-Peña co-founded Freedom University, a “modern day freedom school” in Atlanta that provides tuition-free education, college application and scholarship assistance and social movement leadership training to undocumented students banned from public higher education by Georgia state laws. Dr. Lorgia Garcia-Peña is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of History and Literature at Harvard University.
