Annual Conference
April 2-5, 2025

NACCS 50 Years
Sustaining Centeotzintli y Calli: Our Sacred Knowledge, Conciencia, and Home
Albuquerque, New Mexico

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Call In: 877-227-6963 reference NACCS 2025 Annual Conference Block Code –NCC
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NACCS 2025 Annual Conference Hotel

For those of us who study, research and teach in the field of Chicana/o Studies, NACCS has been our home for 50 years. And while the past few years have seen commemoratios of various 50^ths of the many events, accomplishments, movimientos, and establishments of departments, let us also consider temporalities from an Indigenous epistemology.

Ecological
Perhaps we can mark Chicana/o/x Studies beginning on this continent thousands of years ago, with the domestication of corn (~10,000 years ago). According to the late NACCS scholar, Roberto Cintli Rodríguez, corn is more than just sustenance, it is a symbol of Indigenous survival and cultural continuity. The sacred corn way of life, Centeotztintli, connects us to identity, resistance to colonialism, inter-continental relationships, belonging, community, and spirituality. From a Native perspective, human beings are reflections of the land, and therefore, how we treat the land manifests in the ways we treat ourselves. Understanding the effect of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on corn, we are experiencing the next frontier of colonization--the human body. What we consume and manufacture as food in contemporary mainstream society is having an adverse effect on our current generation and generations that will follow.

Linguistic
In terms of language, while Nahuatl stands with Quechua and Aymara as the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the entire continent, the contemporary diaspora of Indigenous peoples living in the U.S., such as from Oaxaca, Yucatan, and Guatemala, demonstrate the changing demographics, languages, cultures, and diverse Indigenous Nations, hxstories, and Pueblos of las Américas Profundas, Turtle Island, Abya Yala, Pachamama. However, as a discipline we continue to struggle with our own right to claim Indigeneity (often interwoven with spirituality) and even raising the question if we as Xicanas/os/x have a right to define ourselves as Indigenous or as a Pueblo or pueblos united through our diaspora. Part of our colonization has been the apologist nature with which we approach our own Indigeneity, feeling that we are not “Native enough,” “self-policing,” or “gatekeeping” within our own community to determine who has the right to pray, create art, or represent Indigenous culture, questioning our connection because of our displacement or removal from our places of origin.

Politicization
Despite Xicanxs’ participation in the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz, Wounded Knee, the American Indian Movement, the Longest Walk, and the take-over and creation of DQ University, which became the only Native American-Chicana/o tribal college in CA and the U.S., we rarely incorporate these historical moments in our curriculum of Chicana/o Studies. Xicana Feminists, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, catapulted Xicana feminist Indigeneities, with the aim to gain control of our own narratives; telling people who we are as opposed to letting them tell us who we are. Cherrie Moraga’s foundational essay calling for a Queer Aztlan longed for the dismantling of the heteropatriarchal homophobic Chicano nationalism and put forth the queering of our movement and the promotion of land-based knowledge. And of course, the 1994 Zapatista uprising transformed an entire generation of Xicanxs who began to identify more deeply with what it meant to be Indigenous from the selvas de Chiapas to the urban jungles of the barrio. It was also in the late 1990s that the first seeds of what would become Indigenous Caucus began to sprout within NACCS and we began to first see Xicana Indigena scholarship reflected in the conference panels.

Concientización
Xicanx activists marked the years 1492-1992 as 500 years of resistance and 1992-2492 as 500 years of Restoration, meaning that we are now in the process of (Re)Claiming, Healing, (Re)Connecting, and raising our conciencia/consciousness for the ongoing fight for our self-determination and liberation. In Nahuatl, the word for school, or place of education, was Calmecac: Calli/house + Mecatl/lineage. Knowledge was created through a process of a long lineage and a collection of ideas, memories, and thoughts over the generations.

NACCS 2025 calls us back to that sacred, ancestral knowledge and calls us back home/calli to develop the critical hindsight and conceptual clarity on how we envision the continuity of our pueblos and our knowledges.

NACCS continues to provide space for Chicana and Chicano Studies to intellectually, politically, epistemically, and spiritually combat the violence, destruction, and displacement that characterizes the civilization of death and its various modalities (racism, sexism, cis-heteropatriarchy, genocide, classism, coloniality, eurocentrism, ableism, etc.) that we have accepted as the norm. Indigenous ways of knowing challenge us to seek new paradigms, deeper truths of our existence, our wellbeing, life, and our place in the cosmos.

NACCS 2025 asks the question: How can we make an Indigenous paradigm shift in Chicana/o/x Studies? How can we re-ignite the fire of action research in defense of our pueblos, barrios, communities, territories, lands, bodies, waters, climate, earth?