Las Maestras Center — Visión y Propósito

OUR PURPOSE & VISION

The vision of Las Maestras Center (LMC) is generated from the painterly and performative impulse of our first (Meso)American literatures and informed by a contemporary indigenous-identified feminist Xicana[x] perspective. Our multi-disciplinary programming blends visual, performance and literary arts to inform an aesthetic and a directed intention within the creative process; returning artists to their home cultures and contemporary communities of common cause.  

Las Maestras Center endeavors to cultivate writer-artists with a public voice emphasizing process on the road to product; exploring ‘off-book’ sites of learning (as well as written literatures); encouraging embodied art practice; considering the role of geography and land as the holders of ancestral and historical memory; engaging intergenerational exchange with elder (off-campus) teachers and spiritual practitioners;  exploring ways in which knowledge is transmitted orally through story-telling and ceremonial engagement; honoring intuitive and implicate knowledges; considering the location of queer (two-spirit) and female sites of consciencia; and, recognizing traditional ritual structures within the natural environments as avenues toward knowledge and the health of our pueblos and planet.

Our task, as we see it, is to help Latinx communities, and all those who pass through our door, come to remember and acknowledge their origins through the act of art making and critical collective thought; and to do so in concert with the native peoples of this region, the Chumash, as well as the greater area of California peoples.  In our many decades of teaching and art practice, we have witnessed over and over again, that through public pedagogy, young people become empowered to create a literature, a theater, a visual rendering and a daily social practice that counters the impoverishment and cultural amnesia of globalization.  It’s the most and best that we, as maestras and artists, have to give.

In honor of our Nahuatl-speaking forebearers, Tlazocamati

Cherríe Moraga & Celia Herrera Rodríguez