LAS MAESTRAS CENTER
TOWN HALL
Please join us on this afternoon at Las Maestras Center as we gather as students, community, and faculty members.
TUESDAY, MAY 26th | 4:00 pm (PT)
LMC -South Hall 1415 | Register for Zoom Meeting Below
OPEN TO ALL OUR COMUNIDADES!
Querides Colegas, Collaborators and Comunidad,
Since 2017, Las Maestras Center (LMC) has served as an integral space for both the campus and the Santa Barbara community at large. Founded by two influential professors, teachers, and community artists, Celia Herrera Rodríguez and Cherríe Moraga, LMC has grown to become a dynamic intellectual incubator for some of the most innovative critical-creative research emerging out of UC Santa Barbara. From being a creative writing lab, an art studio centering Chicana/o/x and Ethnic Studies pedagogies, to facilitating an expansive network of cultural workers, scholars, artists, activists, writers, healers, and spiritual practitioners from across California and beyond, LMC is more than just a classroom space but operates as a cultural arts research center. UCSB is one of the only universities in the nation that houses such a center rooted in a queer, decolonial, and intersectional feminist vision. This is what makes LMC so special and makes it one of the many centers that contributes to the rigor and notability of the divisions of Humanities and Fine Arts and the Social Sciences.
Through its cross-divisional, community-centered, and culturally-rooted platform, LMC generates a unique space that fosters student retention, supports critical-creative research, and strengthens the bridge between campus and community.
Countless students across departments and divisions (e.g. English, Spanish and Portuguese, Theater and Dance, Chicana/o Studies, Black Studies, Feminist Studies, Sociology) have expressed that they applied to UCSB because of this center and consider LMC an intellectual home. It also serves as a central location for many affiliated professors to develop countless programs and projects centered around shared intellectual work on intersectional feminisms, non-western spiritualities, arts-based research, hemispheric Indigenous rights, amongst other areas. The center also continues to sustain countless collaborations with cultural centers and K-12 schools throughout Santa Barbara and California at large.
Losing this space would have a devastating impact on this generative ecosystem that gives life to students, faculty, and community members. As the co-directors of LMC have retired, LMC continues to be stewarded by a dedicated circle of students and faculty committed to the vision of the center. South Hall 1415 continues to be crucial to so many of us, by sustaining our work and creating affirming spaces for marginalized communities on campus and in our surrounding neighborhoods. We urge you to keep our center open, which would support our important research and community projects!
Thank you so much for your time and attention,
Las Maestras Center Colectiva