Latinx Freedom Conference
A two-day gathering launching the Latinx Freedom Movement Archive, featuring civil rights veterans, scholars, and journalists on the legacy and future of Latinx political organizing in America.
Why we picked this
This isn't a commemoration — it's a working launch of an archive alongside a live reckoning with ICE enforcement and immigrant communities. The combination of 1960s veterans and contemporary journalists makes it an unusually layered conversation.
The Latinx Freedom Conference convenes over two days at the CUNY Graduate Center to launch the Latinx Freedom Movement Archive and Exhibition Project — a long-term effort to document and make accessible the history of Latinx civil rights organizing in the United States. Organized by historians Johanna Fernández and Felipe Hinojosa, the conference brings together veterans of the 1960s Latinx civil rights movement alongside contemporary scholars, cultural leaders, and journalists to examine both historical legacies and present-day urgencies.
Keynote speakers include Martha P. Cotera, a pioneering Chicana feminist and activist whose career spans five decades, and Juan González, journalist and author of Harvest of Empire, one of the essential texts on Latin American immigration to the United States. The April 10 Town Hall — “The Shadow of ICE: What It Means for Latinos and for America” — brings additional voices to bear: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa, William I. Robinson of UC Santa Barbara, and others examining how federal immigration enforcement is reshaping Latinx communities in real time.
The conference is unusually structured to hold past and present in tension — the archive launch situates historical memory alongside live political conditions, asking how the movements of the 1960s speak to the crises of the 2020s. The opening on April 9 includes exhibition programming, while April 10 focuses on current policy with the Town Hall as its centerpiece. Both days are free and open to the public.