08/10/2026
NACCS is coming to San Diego, CA in 2027! 2027 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS)
Annual Conference. Theme: Resisting, Healing, Building: NACCS and the Work of Collective Liberation
MEChA SD Mesa College NACCS M.E.Ch.A San Diego City College San Diego Mesa College Centro Cultural de la Raza Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center
Pacific Northwest National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies
Dear colleagues,
We are excited to announce our April 2027 conference at a vibrant, transborder location for Chicana and Chicano communities: Kosa’aay/San Diego. The theme and location offer many unique vantage points for transfronterizo learning and exchange. We invite you to join us and encourage students, colleagues, and community members to participate and make the annual meeting as powerful as ever.
Call for Proposals: (Deadline October 15, 2026)
2027 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS)
Annual Conference
Place: Kosa'aay/San Diego, California
Date: Early to Mid April 2027 (TBD. Dates are being finalized with hotel negotiation)
Theme: Resisting, Healing, Building: NACCS and the Work of Collective Liberation
Thirty years ago, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) marked its 25th anniversary by affirming a foundational truth, NACCS is not merely an academic association. It is a political force rooted in collective care, critical analysis, and resistance. The conference theme, “Chicana y Chicano Scholarship: Un Compromiso Con Nuestras Comunidades,” spoke directly to the political moment. The conference program warned that Chicana/o Studies departments and programs were being questioned, children were being denied access to education, immigrant communities were being pitted against one another through legal status, and le***an and gay communities were struggling for equal protection. These concerns emerged amid a broader national climate of attack on our communities, including anti-immigrant, anti-bilingual education, and anti-affirmative action campaigns in California, as well as parallel efforts across the country seeking to restrict educational access, civil rights protections, and opportunities for marginalized communities. NACCS affirmed its commitment to political action by organizing an educational rally at the California State Capitol, suspending all conference activities to underscore the urgency of this action and encouraging full participation. The conference made clear that NACCS exists not to accommodate power, but to confront it.
Nearly three decades later, the conditions that shaped that moment have not subsided, they intensified. Our communities continue to confront coordinated attacks on civil and trans rights, escalating gender-based violence, violent immigration enforcement, and the ongoing criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and Brown lives. In San Diego, these realities are especially visible. Federal immigration enforcement has expanded dramatically beyond the U.S.-Mexico border into neighborhoods, workplaces, and community spaces, contributing to a climate of fear and uncertainty for immigrant and mixed-status families. The sharp rise in local immigration arrests, including the detention of longtime residents with no criminal record, has reverberated throughout the region and heightened concerns about due process, family separation, and community safety.
The same forces driving intensified immigration enforcement are also working to erase the intellectual, cultural, and educational foundations that empower our communities. Chicana/o/e and Ethnic Studies programs are increasingly defunded, restricted, or erased through coordinated political efforts designed to silence our histories, dismantle our fields, roll back our gains, and weaken our communities. At the same time, community organizers, educators, artists, youth, and scholars continue to cultivate spaces of resistance, mutual aid, cultural affirmation, and collective liberation. Throughout San Diego, immigrant rights advocates, community organizations, educators, health workers, and residents have responded by strengthening networks of collective care, organizing rapid-response efforts, advocating for local protections, and mobilizing in defense of immigrant communities. These acts of solidarity remind us that even amid intensified repression, our communities continue to build power, protect one another, and advance visions of justice and liberation.
The 2027 NACCS Conference calls on scholars, organizers, artists, educators, and community members to join NACCS in building a collective, organized, and unapologetic force of resistance. We invite proposals that illuminate strategies, practices, relationships, and vision that analyze, challenge and transform systems of power. We welcome scholarship, creative works, pedagogical innovations, community-engaged projects, policy analyses, performances, and organizing strategies that demonstrate the multitude of ways our communities continue to resist and thrive through our imagining and building of liberatory futures.
As we gather in 2027, we invite participants to reflect on both our history and our responsibility. What does it mean to sustain NACCS as a political force at this moment? How do we strengthen our commitments to our communities while confronting new forms of oppression? How do we cultivate the next generation of scholar-activists, educators, artists, and organizers who will carry this work forward?
As we convene in San Diego, we gather on the ancestral homelands of the Kumeyaay/ Kumiaí Nation. Prior to the arrival of Spanish colonizers in 1769, the area now known as Old Town San Diego was the Kumeyaay/Kumiaí village of Kosa'aay (also rendered as Cosoy/Kosoy in Spanish colonial records), meaning “drying out place.” The coexistence of names such as Kumeyaay/Kumiaí and Kosa'aay/Cosoy reflects how the U.S.- Mexico border has produced distinct linguistic, political, and historical trajectories for Indigenous communities whose homelands long predate and transcend that boundary. These histories continue to shape contemporary struggles over land, sovereignty, memory, and belonging, as well as the political, cultural, and intellectual work of Chicana/o/e and Indigenous communities today. We encourage participants to engage questions of Indigenous presence, stewardship, place-making, and decolonial futures within and beyond the borderlands.
The history of NACCS reminds us that resistance has never been our only purpose. We gather not only to resist injustice but also to produce knowledge, nurture leadership, build community, heal collective wounds, and imagine new possibilities for liberation. While resistance remains essential, we also recognize the importance of empowerment, cultural affirmation, Indigenous resurgence, communal-care, healing justice, and community-building as transformative political practices. We invite proposals that honor this legacy while helping shape the future of NACCS and our communities.
Areas of Interest
We welcome submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
Defense and Reimagining of Chicana/o/e and Ethnic Studies
Abolitionist Frameworks and Anti-Carceral Organizing
Migration, Borders, and Resistance to Violent Immigration Enforcement
Trans and Q***r Liberation Movements
Indigenous Sovereignty and Decolonial Praxis
The year 2027 also marks the 40th anniversary of Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a foundational text that transformed understandings of identity, migration, language, gender, sexuality, culture, and belonging. In this spirit, we invite submissions that address Borderlands, transfronterizo/transborder organizing, politics, culture, community, transnationalism, and the Legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa.
Confronting Gender-Based Violence and Community Accountability
Coalition Building Across Black, Indigenous, Chicana/o/e and Communities of Color
Environmental Justice and Land Struggles
In honoring San Diego's rich artistic and political traditions, we also recognize the contributions of Chicana artists whose work expanded the visual and intellectual landscape of the Chicano Movement and the first generation of women artists in Chicano Park who introduced themes often absent from early movement art. In this spirit, we invite submissions that address Art, Cultural Production, Murals, Cultural Memory, and Community Empowerment.
Youth, Education, and Intergenerational Organizing
Archival Practices, Memory, and Counter-Histories
