Locations: La Casa Roja

Maria was a poet, community organizer and Salvadoran refugee who became an integral part of many popular struggles in Los Angeles, California, where she eventually re-settled after fleeing El Salvador in 1980, having barely survived torture at the hands of US-trained paramilitaries. She passed away on May 16, 2015, but her legacy continues through the many lives she touched in this physical realm. In her own words, she states “it has helped me overcome my trauma, the kindness and solidarity of others has helped me...when people rise up we can make social change and create a new world". Friends of Maria Guardado will share stories about her life and legacy, as well as discuss the possibility of publishing a book of poetry in her honor.

Guatemaya Mujeres Resistiendo & Project Luis de Lion cordially invite you to participate in rewriting history with art and poetry. The Jornadas de la Memoria (Tours of Memory) honor Guatemalan writer and poet Luis de Lion in remembrance of his legacy during the anniversary of his kidnapping in May 1984. Guatemaya Mujeres Resistendo is a collective of women, organized and resisting the colonial and patriarchal systems that generate violence.

For more Information: Guatemaya.mujeres.resistiendo@gmail.com

Location: IPR Healing Artz/Chuco's Justice Center

Kency Cornejo focuses on the art of Central America and its US-based diaspora, visual politics in Latin America, and decolonizing methodologies in art and art history. Specifically, she explores creative responses to femicide, immigration, prisons, captivity, transnationalism, gangs, and indigenous rights in Central America, as well as the role of visuality in coloniality and decoloniality. Alicia Siu is an artist specializing in community murals, with her work she makes recognizable the disruptions that hamper our continuation as caretakers of the earth. Quetzal Beats is a collaboration between two decolonial feminists of refugee/immigrant families producing music and artistic visuals of the many historical and present day complexities pertaining to the regions they are ancestrally tied to and those they currently inhabit.

Location: CARECEN Patio

Manlio Argueta is a Salvadoran writer, critic, and novelist of the "Committed Generation", a literary group comprised of revolutionary writers and cultural workers. Because of his writings criticizing the government, Argueta was exiled to Costa Rica in 1972 and was not able to return to El Salvador until the 1990s. Dr. Karina Alma was born in El Salvador and raised in the Pico Union and Westlake regions in Los Angeles.  Her work challenges U.S. disseminated epistemic violence against Central America/ns by centering their lives and narrative works. She critiques systems of race-class-gender that intersect un/documented communities and migrations in context to neoliberalism and settler neocolonialism.

Location: UCLA Labor Center

Featuring Don Pioquinto survivor of the 1932 massacre in El Salvador (visa pending), Ella Turenne, Haitian multi-disciplinary artist, scholar and prison abolitionist, Fred Hampton Jr., Chairman of Black Panther Cubs working to Save the Hampton House, Kanahus Manuel of Tiny House Warriors fighting against Kinder Morgan Pipeline in Secwepemc territory, Moms4Housing (to be confirmed), and Steve Newcomb (Lenape y Shawnee), founder of the Indigenous Law Institute + more.

Location: Healing Artz Space/Chuco's Justice Center

Frida Larios is co-creator of the multi award-winning New Maya Language picto-glyphs and Animales Interiores series based on the logographic principles of ancestral Maya hieroglyphs. The IPR Healing Artz Space has been open since December 2016 working with youth, children and the community to use art as a tool for consciousness raising and decolonization. Frida will be sharing some of her work and will be adding to the collection of murals at the art space/justice center.

Location: Casa Libre—RSVP for address sinfronteras1312@protonmail.com

The Casa Libre/Freedom Home is a licensed emergency and long-term shelter for minors under the age of 18 without homes, including unaccompanied migrant and refugee children. Jose Flores is a self-taught artist whose heart and spirit remain rooted in his place of birth, Guatemala, the heartland of the Maya. He pays homage to his people and ancestors by capturing their sacredness with powerful, dream-like portraits. Together we will enjoy a meal and share space.

A powerful path illuminated by the dispossessed, humble, marginalized people thirsty for justice that today shine with greater intensity through the collective fabric of history, testimony, music, poetry, and visual art. The Central American Cultural Center is an organization with a mission to promote, investigate, document, and preserve the arts, history and culture of the Central American community in Los Angeles.

In commemoration of International Womxn's Day on March 8, we will be honoring the lives of the 41 girls killed in the prison fire at the Virgin of the Assumption Home for Girls in Guatemala 2017. Featuring hip hop en espanol by Femina Fatal, a presentation by the dance group Mujeres en Resistencia, and testimony from water defenders from Mexicali Resiste. The night will end with the cumbia rhythms of Los Waraperos to help us live together and celebrate. Despite everything, we are alive and we can continue fighting and continue loving by embracing and supporting one another because solidarity is the tenderness of the people.

Food and drinks will be served.

Location: CIELO Studios—Los Angeles

Join us as we celebrate the freedom of the surviving members of the MOVE 9 and continue to demand the release of Dr. Mutulu Shakur. We will be featuring Mike Africa Jr. of the MOVE Organization, Edxie Betts, a liberation artist, anti-authoritarian and cultural worker, Walela Nehanda, a non-binary queer community organizer, poet, and leukemia warrior, and Mopreme Shakur of Family and Friends of Dr. Mutulu Shakur. + Updates from Dr. Mutulu's legal team.

Food and drinks will be provided. 

Location: UCLA Promise Institute—Law School Room 1347

Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres, general coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras [COPINH], was born to what she’s described as “a people of great dignity and strength.” She also was born into struggle. She was just a toddler when her mother, Berta Cáceres founded COPINH to defend the land from exploitation by mining, dam-building and logging interests. Upon her mother’s assasination, Zúñiga Cáceres suspended her graduate studies and began to focus on two critical goals: finding and bringing to justice her mother’s murderers and carrying on her mother’s fight for environmental and social justice.

RSVP Here: www.law.ucla.edu/promise symposium

For lunch with Berta, contact sinfronteras1312@protonmail.com