Campus invited to Cantú Memorial Colloquium May 18

The campus community is invited to attend the 5th annual Lionel Cantú Memorial Colloquium at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, May 18, at the Baobab Lounge at Merrill College. A reception hosted by the Lionel Cantú GLBTI Resource Center will follow immediately.

This year's featured guest is Angel David Nieves, assistant professor in the historic preservation program of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland at College Park. His work examines "race-uplift" efforts of late 19th-century African American women reformers who used the built environment to effect social and political change for their communities. Nieves is also the coeditor with Leslie Alexander of the forthcoming volume, "'We Shall Independent Be': African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S."

The colloquium honors the memory of Cantú, an assistant professor of sociology who died unexpectedly in 2002. At UCSC, the Lionel Cantú Memorial Award Fund was established to support a campus graduate student who is pursuing studies in one or more of the areas in which Cantú worked: immigration studies, transnational/cross-border studies, Latino/Latina sociology, gender and sexuality, or gay men and masculinity. This year's recipient of the $500 award will be announced at the colloquium. The 2007 selection committee comprises UCSC faculty members from sociology, Latin American and Latino studies, and the Chicano/a Latino/a Research Center.

Colloquium cosponsors include the Chicano/Latino Research Center, El Centro: Chicano/Latino Resource Center, the Feminist Studies Department, Frank Talamantes (professor emeritus and former dean of graduate studies), the Latin American and Latino Studies Department, the Lionel Cantú GLBTI Resource Center, Queer Theory Cluster, Research Cluster for the Study of Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict, the Sociology Department, and the Sociology Graduate Students of Color Caucus. For more information, please call (831) 459-3168.