Center for the Study of the Peoples of the Americas

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Center for the Study of the Peoples of the Americas

Just Published!


The Center for the Study of the Peoples of the Americas is pleased to announce the release of its latest publications with Casa de las Américas. Please click the images above to access.

Mission

The Center for the Study of the Peoples of the Americas (CESPA) is devoted to the principle that education is the basis for solutions to societal tensions. To this end a primary concern of the Center is the issues stemming from the lived experiences of our students. The purpose of (CESPA) is to promote interest in and knowledge of peoples descendent of Latin American communities, whether of Latino/a, Asian, European, African or indigenous origins, within the US and south of the border through service learning, student and faculty research. CESPA also promotes faculty and public intellectual workshops, symposia, conferences, and lectures. Multimedia forums are utilized to distribute Center programs and research.

The peoples of the Americas have their roots in African, European, Asian, and indigenous cultures. The Center for the Study of the Peoples of the Americas (CESPA), is committed to a deeper understanding of the creation and movements across borders, and the development of border cultures, identities and economies. A primary concern is the lived experiences of our students. The California State University system has among the largest concentration of students of Mexican and Central American extraction of any four-year university system in the country, as well as substantial populations of Asian American and African American students.

To this end CESPA will bring together a group of scholars, researchers, and creative artists from a wide range of disciplines to more effectively provide accessible information to all students and communities about the experiences and the cultures of the more than 50 million Americans of Latin-American extraction and the more than 600 million people living to the south of the United States.

 

Upcoming Events:

From Story to Tsikbal: The Words and Worlds of Contemporary Maya Ts’íib (Writing?) in Yucatán

Monday, March 25, 2024 - 4:00pm to 5:15pm

Event Flyer

Focusing on contemporary literatures written by authors who self-identify as Maya, in this presentation Dr. Worley will consider the relations that Maya writers in Yucatán create between their texts and their communities, their texts and readers, each other, and scholarship produced about their communities. To what extent do they invert the gaze of dominant cultures, and to what extent do they reproduce it? What techniques do they use to get their work into while also subverting the very notions of “writing” and “literature” upon which their status as authors rests? Perhaps most importantly, by encouraging relations that break with current power structures, how do they cultivate a readership that is not so much of the present but of the future, pointing towards the world in which we live while simultaneously shaping a world which is yet to be?

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Caracoleando Among Worlds: The Contemporary Maya Literary Movement in Chiapas

Wednesday, November 29, 2023 - 11:00am to 12:15pm

Event Flyer

Dr. Silvia Soto is associate chair in Native American Studies and an assistant professor in Chicano and Latino Studies at Sonoma State University (SSU). Her research focuses on the contemporary Maya literary movement of Chiapas, Mexico, more specifically on concepts of identity formation, gender relations, and Maya cosmovisions. Her first book, tentatively titled Caracoleando Among Worlds: The Re-construction of Maya Worlds in Chiapas, is currently under contract with the University of Arizona Press.

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