6th Annual Ramona Arreguín de Rosales Lecture: "Where Do We Go From Here? The Young Lords Speak and the Protracted Struggle for Liberation"

Jacqueline (Jacqui) Lazú is a writer, public historian, archivist, and community collaborator whose work bridges scholarship, cultural production, and grassroots activism. Born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, a multiracial, working-class city where Puerto Rican communities were a vital part of the urban fabric but often excluded from cultural and political power. That reality informs her longstanding commitment to documenting Latinx and Afro-Caribbean life, exploring how people build community, resist marginalization, and assert identity through cultural expression. Grounded in Latino studies, Puerto Rican studies, and critical race theory, her research examines diaspora, racial justice, and the intersections of literature, performance, and public history across the Americas.

A central focus of Lazú’s work has been the Young Lords Organization, a grassroots Puerto Rican group that emerged in Chicago during the late 1960s and became a national force for community empowerment and racial justice. Originally a street gang, the Young Lords transformed into a political movement that fought against displacement, police violence, and inequality through direct action, radical education, and coalition building. Lazú has collaborated closely with former members to preserve and interpret their legacy. She helped establish the Young Lords Special Collections at DePaul University, curated public exhibitions, and has published works that document their history and cultural significance. Her forthcoming anthology, The Young Lords Speak: From the Streets of Chicago to Revolutionary Organization (Haymarket Books), brings together archival materials and firsthand accounts. She is also completing Stone Revolutionaries: The Origins of the Young Lords Movement, under contract with Duke University Press, which offers the first full-length critical history of the Chicago chapter’s transformation and political thought.

Beyond her scholarship on the Young Lords, Lazú’s research and teaching engage a wide range of themes in Latinx, Afro-Caribbean, and diasporic cultural production. With a background in literature and cultural studies, she examines how writers, performers, and artists articulate questions of identity, race, memory, and belonging. Her publications examine Nuyorican theater and the decolonial visions of contemporary Latinx authors. She has taught and written about Afro-Caribbean religions, transnational feminisms, and expressive culture as sites of political imagination and survival. Across this work, she highlights the ways that Latinx and Afro-Caribbean communities in the U.S. and the Americas navigate colonial legacies, cultural erasure, and structural inequality through creative forms and everyday acts of resistance.

Lazú has also helped shape academic programs and public initiatives at DePaul University that reflect the core themes of her research. She co-founded the Department of Criminology and served as Acting Chair, integrating her work on racial justice, social movements, and state violence into curriculum and faculty development. Her scholarship on the criminalization of Latinx communities informs this work, as does her long-standing commitment to scholar-activism. As Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs, she supported interdisciplinary collaborations across the college, and during her time directing the Community Service Studies Program, she helped launch the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, deepening her commitment to education as a tool for critical reflection and institutional change. 

Dr. Jimmy Patiño will moderate this year’s Rosales Lecture. 

Jimmy Patiño seeks to critically excavate alternative imaginings of democratic practice among aggrieved communities in the midst of global capitalism. Concentrating on Mexican-origin and broader Latino/a/x communities at the U.S. Mexico Border and in major U.S. urban settings, his work attempts to dialog about the ways that concepts of race, gender and nation create hegemonic class disparities and formulate an array of identities that mobilize social movements and initiate class struggles on multiple fronts.

His first book, Raza Sí, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego asserts that important contingents of Mexican-origin activists in the U.S. engaged, across generations, the crisis over the “illegal alien“ through attempts at organizing the Mexican-origin community across differences of national affiliation and citizenship status. Focusing on San Diego due to its vital positioning as both urban and border space where consistent migration and race-based border policing has occurred, the project illuminates a serious challenge to deportation-oriented immigration policies between 1968 and 1986 through the ideological prism of Chicano self-determination.

He is now working on a number of other projects, including a study that investigates the conceptualization and historical practice of solidarity primarily through the lens of African American, Chicana/o/x, and Puerto Rican sites of struggle in the twentieth century. Important to this investigation are the ways regional differences and geo-historical contexts facilitated articulations of Black-Brown/Afro-Latinx diasporic solidarities and how these articulations led to counter hegemonic activities and theories of revolution across local, national and transnational boundaries. Through a relational and comparative framework, the study will ground these analyses in historical activities in the Midwest, Texas, California and New York in the burgeoning Black and Brown Power movements at the mid to late 20th century. His broader research and teaching interests include Comparative Ethnic Studies, Chicano/a-Latino/a History, diaspora/transnationalism/borderlands, social movements and political mobilizations, and Cultural Studies.

Dr. Gabriela Spears-Rico is a P’urhepecha and Pirinda cultural anthropologist, poet, and Critical Indigenous Studies scholar who completed her B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Stanford University (Honors) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in the same field at U.C. Berkeley.  She serves as an Assistant Professor of Chicano Latino Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship and creative work have been published in Feminist Anthropology, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Chicana Latina Studies and in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, among other venues. Her public scholarship has been featured on Native America Calling, Indigeneity Rising, Latinx Talk and Texas Public Radio. As a board member of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Spears-Rico’s leadership was instrumental in drafting Minnesota Bill SF 2442 Genocide Education mandate. Spears-Rico is a Mellon Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and an NDN Collective Radical Imagination Grant artist. At this institution, she was awarded a McKnight Land Grant Professorship and a residency with the Institute for Advanced Study. Her mentoring work was recognized with the Honoring Indigenous Women Award by the American Indian Student Cultural Center (2022) and the inaugural Excellence in Graduate Student Career Support Award by the College of Liberal Arts (2025). Her first book Mestizo Melancholia and Colonialism in Michoacán is in contract with the University of Arizona Press.