The Chicana Studies Colectiva at Washington State University celebrates Chican@ Latin@ Heritage Month with a day of education, arts and crafts, food and pláticas. This year the Colectiva, working with and supported by the Cultural and Heritage Houses of WSU will provide a day of programming to celebrate “Latina Superheroes of Our Past, Present & Future: From El Santo to Judge Sotomayor.” This is the third year the Cultural and Heritage Houses have worked with WSU faculty, staff and graduate students to bridge university and community, celebrating the history and culture of Chicana and Latinas. La Colectiva, a relatively new group on campus, develops the curriculum for the day and solicits co-sponsors. For 2014, the number of co-sponsors has grown to include the Department of Critical Culture, Gender as Race Studies, and the graduate students organization Camaradas. Asnoted by Linda Heidenreich, a member of la Colectiva, “in a time of changing demographics, we need now, more than ever, to bridge university and community.”
Named after the ancient Aztec night school, this year’s Freedom School will begin with story time, then break into two workshops, one for children and one for adults. After a lunch where the winners of the Chicana Latina Heritage Month Poster competition are announced, participants from both workshops will come together to make super-hero/heroína masks and share stories of their favorite real or imagined super-heroes/heroínas. Because poetry matters, the program will begin and end with a poem.
This year the Cuicacalli will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday, October 11. For more information or to reserve a space contact Marc Robinson: Marc_robinson@wsu.edu, 509-339-6172.
