College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

WLC Festival of Languages, Cultures, and Ideas

This page shares information about previous FLCI presenters and events. 

Spring 2022 Theme: Voices Together: Reuniting and Rebuilding Communities

View Recordings

View recordings from many of the 2022 FLCI presentations and musical performances. 

2022 Schedule at a Glance

Thursday, March 17, 2022

Friday, March 18, 2022

Acknowledgments

The School of World Languages and Cultures extends our appreciation for the partnership and interdisciplinary engagement from across the campus, including: College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS); Computing and Design (CD); Humanities and Communication (HCOM); International Programs (IP); Music and Performing Arts (MPA); Social, Behavioral, and Global Studies (SBGS); Visual and Public Art (VPA); the World Theater; and CSUMB Special Events Funding.

FLCI 2022 Guest Speaker, Performance and Presentation Information

Fábrika T-shirt Screen Printing Workshop

The VPA-sponsored screen printing workshop features a 2022-themed image printed on a takeaway T-shirt at VPA Building 70, Thursday from 10-12. The first 100 people get to print a free T-shirt to take home.

Cultural Tabling & Performances

Multiple CSUMB Student Clubs tabled on the Main Quad, Thursday, from 11:30-2. Groups included M.E.Ch.A. de CSUMB, Spanish Club, Native American Students United (CSUMB), Asian and Pacific Islander Association Club, Anime Club, and Japan Club. They shared information about their events and activities alongside multiple campus organizations including the International Programs Office, Otter CrossCultural Center (OC3), and the Undocu-Success Support Program. Some clubs provided performances. 

Unicorn Medicine: Tender Hearts in Troubled Times

Event Description

A storytelling and poetry event w/ Q & A

Bio

Maya Chinchilla, author of “The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética,” is a writer, educator and media maker. She teaches as a lecturer in Chicana/o Latino/a/x Studies, creative writing, English and LGBTQ studies. Drawing on a tradition of truth-telling and poking fun at the wounds we carry, Maya's writing and performance explores themes of historical memory, family, tenderness, sexuality, and alternative futures. She is also the editor of the forthcoming “CentroMariconadas,” an anthology of queer and trans Central American writing, and has been working on some pandemic projects including: co-hosting three seasons of a women of color-centered sci-fi podcast; writing and producing the show "Central American Unicorns in Space;" hosting a new arts and culture interview show called Live and Queer for QCC; taking online Puerto Rican Bomba classes and conducting online writing coaching sessions for creatives and writers alike.

Faculty facilitator Dr. Carolyn González 

Community-Driven Archiving: The Watsonville is in the Heart Initiative

Event Description

Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH) is a community-driven public history initiative to preserve and uplift stories of Filipino migration and labor in the greater Pajaro Valley of California’s Central Coast. The initiative documents the plight, struggles, vitality, and resilience of the manong generation of Filipino migrants who first settled in the Pajaro Valley in the early twentieth century. The project is spearheaded by Dioscoro "Roy" Respino Recio, Jr., the founder of the Filipino American heritage organization, The Tobera Project, in partnership with the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). The digital archive project emerged from the WIITH community-university partnership. It includes oral histories, family photographs, family heirlooms, letters and correspondences, and newspaper clippings. The digital archive site officially launches on April 9, 2022. In the “Community-Driven Archiving” presentation, WIITH Digital Archive Co-Director Meleia Simon-Reynolds, will provide an overview of the local histories that are preserved in the archive. She will also discuss the WIITH team’s process for building an accessible digital archive and the values and ethical considerations that inform WIITH’s community-driven research methodologies. These include: forming strong relationships, privileging community perspectives, and promoting community agency and ownership.

Bio

Meleia Simon-Reynolds is a Ph.D. candidate in History at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research examines photographs taken of and by Filipinx communities in Hawai‘i and the Pajaro Valley region during the twentieth century to uncover how Filipinx migrants and their families used and continue to use image-making and collecting practices as an alternative, subversive tactic as they navigated transpacific migration, racialized dependent labor, violence, and (neo)colonialism. Meleia began working with the Watsonville is the Heart (WIITH) community-driven research initiative in January 2021. Alongside Christina Ayson Plank, Meleia is the Co-Director of the WIITH digital archive project.

Faculty facilitator Dr. Dustin Wright 

AAPI Panel Discussion

Voices Together: Reuniting and Rebuilding Communities

Thursday 4-5, Zoom

Event Description

Please join us for a stimulating conversation about the enormous increase in Asian hate crimes across the country and beyond. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an alarming escalation of hate crimes against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. Anti-Asian hate crimes increased 339% nationwide in 2021 and there was a staggering 567% increase in San Francisco. These incidents of hate include violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. Today’s panel consists of two members from the local community and two CSUMB faculty members who will discuss the history of the AAPI communities in the Monterey area, what activities they have been involved with, and what we can do to end the violence and hate against people of AAPI heritage.

Speakers

Bios

Jason Galinato Agpaoa is a museum enthusiast and board member for Asian Cultural Experience (ACE), general member for Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS), Monterey Bay Chapter, and advisor for the Filipino American Youth Club of the Filipino Community of Salinas Valley. Inspired by his experiences as an Asian American Studies student at San Francisco State University and a decade of museum experience in the Bay Area and Central Coast, his dream is to practice and implement an Ethnic Studies Museum Education program at the future site of the Salinas Chinatown Museum and Cultural Center.

Larry Oda was born in a Justice Department Internment Camp in Crystal City, Texas during World War II and lives in Monterey. He went to Monterey City Schools and earned his BA and MA from California State University, Fresno. Larry was National President of the Japanese American Citizens League and is Chair Emeritus of the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation.

Dr. Eric Tao is a full Professor of Computer Science at CSUMB for over 20 years. He is the founding director of the Institute for Innovation and Economic Development at CSUMB. In 2021, he co-founded Coalition for Asian Justice in Monterey Bay. He is passionate about innovation, technology, and global economics and regularly speaks in international forums on these subjects. Dr. Tao obtained his bachelor's degree from Taiwan and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine.

CSUMB Professor Angie Ngọc Trần teaches political economy. Her latest book, Ethnic Dissent and Empowerment: Economic Migration between Vietnam and Malaysia, integrates ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and cultural resources with worker resistance and empowerment. Her ongoing research interests are on Mexican H2A agricultural guestworkers, and Vietnamese domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.

Faculty facilitator Dr. Shigeko Sekine

Fandango y Convivencia: A Participatory Engagement in Music Making

Event Description

Jarocho music of Southern Veracruz has been evident within communities of California as early on as the 1940s. Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero recorded with the Trio Imperial the son jarocho, El Balajú in the late 1940s. Since then various groups and musicians provided communities throughout the state with wonderful presentations and performances of jarocho music. In 1989, however, when the Grupo Mono Blanco visited the Bay Area, a new proposal of the son jarocho was shared, in which the idea of “participatory” engagement through this expression superseded the common manner of “presentational performance” (Turino 2008). This new approach was based in the longtime practice of the fandango, a gathering in which music, song (poetry), and dance are centered within a larger social activity that participants in these gatherings framed as a convivencia (convivial interaction). I argue that the fandango celebrations ultimately lead to other types of interactive engagements between musicians, dancers and artists (recordings, concerts, workshops), but more importantly, reveal an affirmation and strengthening of community through a consciousness of shared history, mutual aid, cultural promotion, as well as political action.

Bio

Russell C. Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor of Music at UCSC. He has contributed chapters to various anthologies on Latina/o expressive culture and co-authored an article with George Lipsitz, “Turning Hegemony On its Head: The Insurgent Knowledge of Américo Paredes,” in the Journal of American Folklore. Rodríguez has worked as a curator for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage annual American Festival, co-curating the “Latino Music Program” in 2004. In 2005 he co-produced the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings CD compilation Rolas de Aztlán: Songs of the Chicano Movement that featured the unsung Chicana/o musical artists and groups of the 1970s. 

Faculty facilitator Dr. David Vila Dieguez

Gender justice and language education

Gender justice and language education: Toward a more equitable and robust engagement with trans knowledges and linguistic practices

Event Description

Language teaching and learning can be a site of expansive possibilities for identity (re)construction, despite the ways that gendered impossibilities and invisibilities have often been allowed to persist. In the context of scant attention to gender in the curriculum, textbooks, research, and pedagogy of language classrooms, this talk offers trans-affirming queer inquiry-based pedagogies as one path toward more critical, equitable, and gender-just language pedagogies.

Bio

Kris Aric Knisely (Ph.D., Emory University) is Assistant Professor of French and Intercultural Competence as well as affiliated faculty in both SLAT and TSRC at the University of Arizona. Knisely's research broadly considers gender and sexuality in language teaching and learning and, in its most specific form, focuses on the linguistic and cultural practices of trans and nonbinary French language users, particularly as they can inform the articulation gender-just language pedagogies.

Faculty facilitator Dr. Rebecca Pozzi 

Japanese Tea Ceremony

About Tea Ceremony

The word 'Chado,' also known as chanoyu, means "the way of tea" and is a spiritual and aesthetic discipline for refinement of the self. Known in Japanese as a "do," a 'way,' it centers on the activity of the host and guests spending a mutually heartwarming time together over a bowl of matcha tea. The host aims to serve the guest a bowl of tea, and the guest responds with thankfulness. It also infers that the time shared together can never be repeated.

The tea was introduced into Japan from China in the eighth century, it was at first used as a medicine. In the sixteenth century, the form of Chado that is practiced today was established by the tea master Sen no Rikyu. The ceremony was developed under the influence of Zen Buddhism, the aim of which is to purify the soul by becoming one with nature. The true spirit of the tea ceremony encompasses the feeling of harmony, respect, purity and tranquility.

Seating is limited. Please be sure to register and arrive on time in order to participate. 20 participants will gather around tables to observe and participate in the tea ceremony. Others can observe from a distance. The ceremony will take 45 minutes to complete and will give you time to enjoy the pleasant atmosphere and tranquility of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. Take the time to enjoy the tea and Japanese sweets and relax with this rare cultural experience.

Faculty facilitator Dr. Shigeko Sekine 

Akina Miyata and Bobby Phillips – Spring Sakura Jazz and Japanese music

Akina Miyata and Bobby Phillips – Spring Sakura Jazz and Japanese music performance

Bios

Akina Miyata - The “Queen of Jazz” from the Osaka/Kansai region – Akina Miyata is considered to be one of the tops in jazz vocals from Japan! Akina has performed in many of the jazz clubs in Japan and in the United States. Akina Miyata has attracted top musicians from around Japan and has been televised on numerous occasions on Japan’s NHK Television Station. Recently she has been on the stage of The Apollo Theater, Harlem Jazz Club Sugar Bar, the Village NuBlu, and Here in Monterey at the Lodge at Pebble Beach. Born in Wakayama Japan, Living in Monterey, CA.

Bobby Phillips - Bob began his love affair with the piano at the age of 7, and has been playing professionally since he was 17 years old. A consummate musician and without a doubt one of the finest performers on the Monterey Peninsula, Bob Phillips specializes in all styles of music ranging from swing and pop to classical and jazz, all performed with a mix of integrity and flair.

Faculty facilitator Dr. Shigeko Sekine 

MPA and WLC Music Sessions

Friday 5-6 pm, World Theater

Enjoy musical performances from talented musicians in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. 

Faculty facilitator Dr. David Vila Dieguez 

Watsonville Taiko Group and Shinsho-Mugen Daiko

Five Fortunes of the Plum Blossom

Friday 6-7, World Theater

Event Description

In the frosty months of February and March, a wonderful phenomenon can be seen across Japan; plum blossoms, although fragile, endure the bitter cold to open their petals. As they flower, they're said to bring with them a five-fold fortune: longevity, wealth, health, virtue, and destiny.
Taking heart from this message, Watsonville Taiko and Shinsho Mugen Daiko want to share the strength of the plum blossom this spring with the community. Taiko is a traditional presence in many festivals welcoming the turning of the seasons, and we are seeking to mark the transition between our long-endured winter and this new, hopeful spring. Through Taiko drumming, we will shake off the torpor of the cold and breathe life into a new chapter of our lives.

Bio

Watsonville Taiko Group was founded by Jim Hooker in 1991 to spread the joy of traditional Japanese drumming to the Monterey Bay Area. Through a wide range of classes and performances, we offer the chance for people to become involved in both music and their communities. We emphasize 'folk art', which values people’s participation with others in order to keep traditions alive. Watsonville Taiko - http://www.watsonvilletaiko.org 

Shinsho-Mugen Daiko was founded in 1999 by Watsonville Taiko's artistic director, Ikuyo Conant. Shinsho means “celestial bodies” and Mugen means “source of dreams.” The group introduces a contemporary style of taiko with movements and powerful sounds. 

Faculty Facilitator Dr. Shigeko Sekine 

Parking and Getting Here

Coming to campus information. Parking for events at World Theater and University Center is suggested to use Lot 59. Parking permits must be displayed at all times. Purchase a permit in most parking lots or purchase online (select CSU Monterey Bay from the list) and print in advance.

For more information or disability accommodations

Contact wlc@csumb.edu | 831-582-3863

2021-2019 Speakers and Events