Join us September 19, 1-3pm for a panel discussion and celebration of the publication of ¡Habla! Speaking Bodies and Dancing Our América by Jade Power-Sotomayor.
¡Habla! (NYU Press 2026) explores how the dancing body “talks back” to colonial modernity—how, through movement, sound, and rhythm, communities across "our América" enact forms of knowing and being that continue to generate meaning, connection, and possibility.
For more on the book see: https://nyupress.org/9781479802067/habla/
Book signing to follow the panel discussion with books available for purchase.
There will also be a community bombazo at Mujeres Brewhouse from 5-9pm.
Dr. Jade Power-Sotomayor is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar and performer and Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego where she teaches a range of classes on Puerto Rican and Latinx/Latine cultural studies, Puerto Rican bomba dance, Teatro, dance history, social movements, nightlife cultures, and the power of ritual and collective embodied expression. She is also the current Director of the Chicanx Latinx Studies Program at UCSD. She has published extensively about bomba dance history and practice, about activist performance and about performance in the San Diego-Tijuana borderlands. Her writing and publications have been recognized with several awards across various professional organizations. She also works as a dramaturg and co-directs and performs with the San Diego group Bomba Liberté and is proud to be the current Vice President of the Centro Cultural de la Raza's Board of Directors.
Panelists:
Dr. Martha Gonzalez is a Chicana artivista, musician, feminist music theorist and Associate Professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at Scripps/Claremont College. A Fulbright (2007-2008), Ford (2012-2013) and Woodrow Wilson Fellow (206-2017), her academic interests have been fueled by her own musicianship as a singer/songwriter and percussionist for Grammy Award (2013) winning band Quetzal.
Ines Mangual-Cabassa, MA is a Cali-born Chicana-Rican, veteran educator, and performing artist. With more than 25 years of experience in education, she currently teaches eighth-grade Spanish. With a B.A. in American Literature and Cultures from UCLA and a master’s degree from SUNY New Paltz, she is currently pursuing a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction, with an emphasis in Second Language Acquisition, at the American College of Education. Ines is also an accomplished bomba dancer and drummer and knowledge keeper who has performed with Alma Moyo, Bomba Liberté, Legacy Women, the Welfare Poets, and BombaYo.
Dr. Leslie Quintanilla is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University and completed her PhD in Ethnic Studies at UCSD. Her grassroots organizing and research praxis focuses on contemporary issues related to transnational borderland activisms, including women-of-color feminist artivism, environmental justice and climate change activism, and cross-diasporic solidarities. Broadly, her long-term interests include: Zapatismo, US///Mexico border(s), Italian & Mediterranean border(s), climate change, and movement organizing.
Dr. Ana Celia Zentella, Bronx born with a Puerto Rican mother and a Mexican father is one of the foremost researchers in what she has named “anthro-political linguistics”. She is a central figure in the study of U.S. Latin@ varieties of Spanish and English, Spanglish, and language socialization in Latin@ families, and a respected critic of the linguistic profiling facilitated by English-only laws and anti- bilingual education legislation. Her book, Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York helped shift national conversations about bilingual education. In 2022 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.