2025-26 Events

Image of students facing forward and listening to student presenter.

Image of Aurora Vergara-Figueroa, one of the invited speakers for the 2025-2026 New Vocabularies, New Grammars: Améfrica series.

New Vocabularies, New Grammars: Améfrica

This year's New Vocabularies, New Grammars is a return to Leila Gonzalez's influential concept of amefricanidade as the framework for the lectures and mini-seminars in the series. Amefricanidade was Gonzalez's theorization of the African diaspora in the American context, centering the amefrican and amerindian experience and reality in the Americas as opposed to latinidad. Gonzalez embodied this theorization through her diasporic travels and her fieceless activism against structural racism, in the Movimento Negro Unificado and Nzinga. Honoring Gonzalez's interventions and figure, the series was convened by Karol Alzate Londono (Spanish & Portuguese), Nadia Ellis (English), Courtney Morris (Gender & Women's Studies) and Tianna Paschel (African American and African Diaspora Studies), as a constellation of conversations with scholars, artists and activists from and about Améfrica. This series is co-sponsored by the Center for African Studies.

Fall 2025

Oct 9-10 | Oluremi Onabanjo 

Presented in collaboration with the Berkeley Film & Media Seminar, the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, the History of Art Department, the Arts Research Center, and the Center for African Studies.

Oct 29 | Marta Moreno Vega

Presented in collaboration with the Center for African Studies, the Center for Race and Gender,the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religions, the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, and Berkeley Graduate Lectures. 

Nov 6-7 | Aurora Vergara-Figueroa 

 Presented in collaboration with the Center for African Studies.

Spring 2026

Feb 5-6 | Danielle Roper

 Presented in collaboration with the Center for African Studies.

Apr 9-10 | Christen Smith

 Presented in collaboration with the Center for African Studies.

Novedades/Lançamentos: New Scholarship @ Berkeley

This series will highlight new work from UC Berkeley scholars on Latin America and the Caribbean.

Fall 2025

Oct 22 | Maria Paz Gutierrez 

Nov 4 | Alejandra Echeverri Ochoa 

Nov 18 | Coletivo de Tradutores Berkeley-Brasil

Spring 2026

Feb 17 | Nathaniel Wolfson

Faculty and Student Series

Event series organized by Berkeley faculty and students, cosponsored by CLACS

CLACS Working Groups

The Anticolonial Workshop

The Anticolonial Workshop centers anticolonial projects in the Caribbean, its global diaspora and anticolonial traditions and struggles around the world. The workshop brings together UC Berkeley students and faculty across disciplines to ground our understanding of what “anticolonial” means in our theory, methods, and praxis. The workshop is a space for knowledge exchange and feedback on work-in-progress including papers, grant proposals, abstracts, and other materials. 

Berkeley Latin American and Caribbean History 

The mission of the Berkeley Latin American and Caribbean History Working Group (BLACH) is to provide a platform for the workshopping, diffusion, and continued professionalization of Latin American and Caribbean history.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. 

Sep 18 | Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez

Oct 17| Elizabeth O'Brien

CINETECA: Latin American Film 

The mission of this working group is to stage a conversation between contemporary Latin American cinema, historical film movements like El Nuevo Cine and Tercer Cine, and the critical articulation of these movements by thinkers, writers, and filmmakers. We will focus on independent, less commercial films treating political and social issues prevalent in Latin America and the Caribbean, with special attention paid to queer, feminist, indigenous, Afrolatine, migrant cinemas, and student movements.

Dec 16 | TK Film Screening 

Crimmigration

The Berkeley Crimmigration Working Group critically interrogates the complexities of the immigration system that have led and continue to lead to the criminalization of migrants and migration. Over the course of the academic year we will join in community and conversation with other scholars across various disciplines to engage critically with theories of criminality, borders, and migration. Our event series is open to students and faculty across different fields and provides a supportive platform for interested scholars to network and collaborate on the overarching field of crimmigration. 

Sep 22 | Teach-in Pt. 1

Oct 16 | Teach-in Pt. 2

Nov 12 | Film Screening

Digital Ecologies: Transformations and Environmental Justice in Latin America

The Digital Ecologies working group brings together students and faculty from diverse disciplines to study the socio-environmental impacts of digital transformation in Latin America. Focusing on El Salvador, the group examines how technologies like cryptocurrency, AI, and digital industries affect ecosystems, land, and communities. Their research uses interdisciplinary methods such as sentiment analysis, visual ethnography, and remote sensing. Key themes include environmental health, climate justice, and social equity. The group meets biweekly and will host student-led research showcases in Fall 2025 and Spring 2026.

Dec 12 | Fall Showcase

Mexican Studies 

The Mexican Studies Working Group brings together graduate students and faculty to explore how writers and scholars engage with and rethink the cultural archive in Mexico. Meeting twice a month during the 2025–2026 academic year, the group will discuss recent scholarship, workshop research projects, and host speakers focused on Mexican cultural production. It welcomes research on Mexican languages, literatures, and cultures, including works beyond national borders and the traditional canon. The group aims to map new archival forms and expand understandings of Mexican identity and culture.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. 

Dec 5 | Fall Research Showcase

More information on working groups here

CLACS Co-Sponsored Event Series

Mesoamerica: Disrupting Narratives, Past and Present

Disrupting Narratives in Mesoamerica, Past and Present seeks to bring to UC Berkeley scholars of Mesoamerican Studies, Mesoamerican scholars, and Mesoamerican practitioners from the parts of or who focus on the Mesoamérica known today as México and Guatemala in order to situate Mesoamérica as a site of past and present recorded and misremembered State and social violence. The contributions made by the speakers seek to push the boundaries of Mesoamerican intellectual and political thought, as well as literary and artistic practices. This series will bring together works and archives from Zapotec, Nahua, and Maya lands in order to explore the following questions: i) How does the term Mesoamérica become an analytical tool to look beyond the violence of the nation-state? ii) How does their work resist against Western conceptions of history and geography to propose an alternative mapping of Mesoamerican epistemologies? And, iii) how do they situate historical and cultural archives to recenter Indigenous communities and thoughts in their work?

Nov 6 | Paulina Pineda

Participatory, Land-based, and Critical Environments (PLACE)

The Participatory, Land-based, And Critical Environments (PLACE) Collective brings together Berkeley graduate students, post-docs, faculty, and affiliated researchers who are critically engaging with participatory methodologies, land relations, and place-making in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Through the PLACE Event Series, we engage the Berkeley community in conversations that aim to 1) examine critical participatory approaches as both a subject and method in interdisciplinary research in the LAC region; 2) attend to the land relations of academic research by applying these methodologies in conversation with critical environmental geographies; and 3) cultivate a learning community rooted in critical knowledge practices. The PLACE Event Series aims to cultivate community across and beyond Berkeley's campus through a series of engaging lectures, panels, collective projects, workshops, and a documentary film screening with the goal of generating collective opportunities to  to learn, challenge, and create best practices in critical participatory research. Learn more or contact PLACE Collective. 

Sept 15 | Danielle Rivera

Presented in collaboration with the College of Environmental Design. 

Sept 25 | Community-Emerged Methods Series - Session #1

Presented in collaboration with the Brown University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), The Moth, and the Grupo de Estudios Ambiente y Sociedad (GEAS) del Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). 

Oct 23 | Community-Emerged Methods Series - Session #2

Presented in collaboration with the Grupo de Estudios Ambiente y Sociedad (GEAS) del Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). 

Nov 24 | Community-Emerged Methods Series - Session #3

Caribbean Thought

This four-part event series seeks to transform the dialogue from the trauma of the latest Caribbean crises to a vibrant exploration of the question “How does the Caribbean continue to be a site for popular resistance and reimagination of anti-colonial forms of sovereignty?” Featuring discussions, a workshop, and sonic and visual storytelling with esteemed scholars, this series aims to emphasize life and repair beyond colonial disasters within the Caribbean context, through critical engagements with music, film, and more. The series is collaboratively led by a multidisciplinary team, including Rayyaan Hector (Department of Geography), Ana Blanco (Department of Sociology), Isaiah Blake (Department of Geography), Cherise Higgins (Department of Ethnomusicology), and Pablo Paredes (Department of Performance Studies).

Co-sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities. 

Oct 9 | Sounds of Freedom 

Presented in collaboration with the New Vocabularies, New Grammars: Améfrica series.

*Click here for more information on the CLACS Co-Sponsored Event Series Grants

More Events

Fall 2025

Sep 19 | Sueli Maxakali

Presented in collaboration with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Oct 15 | Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Presented in collaboration with the LitQuake Festival.

Nov 13 | Venezuela Teach-In

Spring 2026

More coming soon!