Director’s Initiatives

Dr. Taft has recently begun her tenure as the Huerta Center Director and is currently working on developing three new programs that all aim to strengthen relationships, build community, and bolster the research and social change efforts already taking place at UCSC.  

The Youth Activist Research initiative will support student and youth organizations and leaders to imagine and conduct high-quality research projects that can further their own social change goals, especially those aimed at transforming local institutions (including our own campus) to better meet the needs of youth of color, immigrant youth, and youth from low-income communities.  We are currently meeting with students and community leaders to develop this work and welcome interested individuals to reach out.

Faculty thematic lunches are a new opportunity for faculty members to gather with other researchers from across campus who may be working on similar topics or areas in an informal setting.  Finding time and space to connect across disciplines, divisions, and the dispersed landscape of our campus can be a challenge and these lunches aim to reduce some of the barriers to this kind of casual scholarly interaction.  If you are a UCSC faculty member who’d like to discuss the possibilities of a Huerta Center-facilitated faculty lunch gathering, please email us.

Graduate student Thinking Out Loud brown bag lunches are similarly intended to be sites of informal intellectual engagement.  In this series, graduate students are invited to bring a specific puzzle, challenge, or research and writing dilemma to a group of supportive Huerta Center community members for collective problem-solving and discussion.

Histories of UCSC Chicanx/Latinx Student Activism

We’ve begun an exciting new project that involves undergraduate students learning about and sharing the history of Chicanx/Latinx student activism here at UCSC. Students explored the university archive, including reading through old issues of TWANAS, the radical student of color newspaper, poring through photographs and poster collections, and digging into the papers of previous Chancellors to understand the institutional responses to student demands. They also interviewed 9 Latinx alumni who shared their experiences as organizers on campaigns ranging from the occupation of Hahn after the passage of Proposition 209 and the movement to “Dump Sodexho” in the late 1990s to early undocumented student organizing. Students then created a digital zine and series of Instagram posts that explore the transformative political visions and enduring impacts of generations of Latinx student activists who have fought to make UCSC a more inclusive and socially just institution and created their own communities of belonging and care in the process. We’ll continue to document and share this history in the year ahead.