Zapata Vive, La Lucha Sigue: Legacies of the Zapatist Revolution on the Americas’ Indigenous and Communal Movements

Panelists: 

• Obed Arango, Founder and Director of the Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Educación (CCATE); Mexican journalist, anthropologist, visual artists and filmmaker

• Jennifer Ponce de León (née Flores Sternad), Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania; Affiliated Professor with Latin American and Latino Studies.

• Perla Lara, a journalist and activist; Special Reporter with El Sol

• Holly Link, PhD, Director of Educational Programming and Research at the Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Educación (CCATE).

Perla Lara, MA

Perla Lara is a Social Psychologist from “Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana” UAM in Mexico; with graduate studies in Cultural Anthropology, Historical Demography,  and Intercultural Dialogue from the University of Pavia. She has also taught Geopolitics & Communication, and Psychology in “IUFIM Universidad Franco Ingles” She worked as a news television producer of television in Mexico in Televisa, the largest television network,  but before and after that experience  she has practiced in community journalism covering social justice issues in Italy and the United States. Between 1993 and 1999, she was both a student and educator in Zapatista communities, in Chiapas, Mexico. In particular, in collaboration with UAM Xochimilco and the faculty of philosophy at UNAM, she taught a course to improve literacy in their communities, based on the writings of Freire and Unamuno. She also served as a volunteer Alianza Civica, where she traveled to 70 percent of the municipalities in Chiapas, Mexico teaching about human and civic rights. https://www.linkedin.com/in/perla-lara-6b552330/ http://elsoln1.com/staff/perla-lara/ 

Obed Arango: What does community mean? The Zapatista Legacy in the formation of CCCATE 

Obed Arango, Founder and Executive Director of the Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Educación (CCATE), is a Mexican journalist, anthropologist, visual artist and filmmaker. Former faculty of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and professor at Montgomery County Community College, in 2006 he created the radio program, Villa Inmigrante, which was broadcast on Mexico’s Radio Universidad de Guadalajara. From 1994-2001, he conducted an ethnography of Mexico City’s Central Square, with a particular focus on the Zapatista movement. In 2015 Obed was the recipient of the prestigious Dr. Orlando Costas Service Award from Eastern University. He was also Education Champion of the Year at the 2016 Hispanic Choice Awards. His current research focuses on the Villa Inmigrante in Norristown, PA.

Jennifer Ponce de Leon: Arts and/or Gender after the Zapatist Revolution

Jennifer Ponce de León is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in American Studies from the New York University. Her research is situated at the intersection of literary studies, studies of contemporary visual arts and aesthetics, and the study of left social movements, bringing together contemporary U.S. Latino and Latin American cultural production within a hemispheric framework. Her current book project, Radical Politics Across the Arts of the Americas: Engagement & Experimentation in the New Millennium, is an interdisciplinary and transnational study of politically engaged literature, art, and performance by artists in Argentina and Chicana/o and Mexican artists in the U.S. Among other publications, her essay on her experience in the first course of the Zapatistas’ Little School of Freedom [Escuelita de la libertad según las y los Zapatistas] was published in Dancing with the Zapatistas (Duke U. Press) and an essay on anticolonial art inspired by Zapatismo is forthcoming in American Quarterly in March 2018. Dr. Ponce de León has also worked in the contemporary arts sphere; an exhibition based on her research on political art in the Americas will be on view at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia this September & October.

Holly Link, PhD

Holly Link, PhD, is Director of Educational Programming and Research at the Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Educación (CCATE). A former bilingual teacher, she is also an educational consultant in the fields of English as a Second Language and Dual-Language Education. Holly teaches at Temple University, the Greenfield Intercultural Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and at CCATE. At CCATE, she is developing a participatory research center for young people and adults through which they can promote social transformation and inform public policy. Her research on Latinx students and schooling has been published in the Harvard Educational Review, the American Educational Research Journal, and the Journal of Latinos and Education.