A Central Valley: California's Chicana/o Art Corridor

Dr. Ella Maria Diaz takes you on a ride down “el 99,” touring and discussing primary sources of Chicana/o art history, poetry, and other cultural production from the 1960s and 1970s Chicano movement to propose California’s Central Valley as a corridor of and for a Chicana/o art history.
Dr. Ella Maria Diaz is Professor and Chair of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San José State University and serves on the Editorial Board of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies (UCLA). She specializes in Chicano/a art, performance, and political activism during the U.S. civil rights era, and in the visual and cultural analyses of testimonio as an art of the Americas. Her first book Flying Under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force: Mapping a Chicano/a Art History (2017) won the 2019 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award. In 2021, her second book José Montoya (2020) received Gold Medal awards for Best Arts Book and Best Biography from the International Latino Book Awards. Among several chapters and journal articles, Diaz’s 2017 essay in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies was anthologized in The Chicano Studies Reader: An Anthology of Aztlán, 1970-2016.
This event was made possible with support from the Bakersfield College Social Justice Institute in collaboration with Digital Ethnic Futures.