Join us as we seek a new engagement with the history of California’s missions, vastly mythologized yet profoundly understudied. Through reconsideration of the missions as both physical sites and foci of interpretation, we will pursue new research that surfaces both Native and Mexican/Mexican-American voices in the history of California and the U.S. Reflecting trends in public history over the last decade, our research will foster more complex, multidimensional public engagements with difficult histories.

Our keynote speakers will be Dr. Yve Chavez, UCSC and Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, UT Austin.

Art historian Dr. Yve Chavez (Tongva, Akimel and Tohono O’odham) specializes in Indigenous and Colonial Latin American visual culture. She researches Indigenous contributions to California’s Franciscan missions and Native agency in early modern global exchange networks. Chavez is assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Historian Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra specializes in the formative role of Latin America to the colonial history of the USA and to the history of “Western” modernity as a whole. Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

This event is made possible by The Terra Foundation for American Art. Presented by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, this conference is co-sponsored by Critical Mission Studies, UC Mexico Initiative, and the UCLA Department of Art History.