CSU Pueblo’s sixth annual gathering brought Chicano and Indigenous scholars, artists, and students together and named three faculty research grant recipients for 2027
October 7, 2026
Scholars, students, educators, and community members filled the Occhiato Student Center Ballroom at Colorado State University Pueblo on Sept. 25 for the Aztlán Research Center’s sixth annual Institute. The free, daylong program took on the theme “Aztlán as Refugio: Place, Memory, and Belonging in Educación and Community” through poetry, testimonio, and a lobby of Indigenous and Chicano vendors. The center also awarded three $2,000 faculty research grants for 2027, including a project to protect farmworkers from extreme heat.
A poet’s history of loss and healing
Ramon del Castillo delivered the first keynote, “Chicano Poetry for Aztlán as Refugio and Belonging.” Del Castillo chaired the Chicana/o Studies Department at Metropolitan State University of Denver for 13 years and wrote a column for the Rocky Mountain News. He mixed poetry with history, walking the room through the Mexican American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed Feb. 2, 1848. Mexicans who stayed on the ceded land became U.S. citizens in name. In practice, he said, they lost their land and were treated as second-class citizens.
“Our presence here today is indicative of that unresolved historical trauma,” del Castillo told the audience. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t feel that somehow that loss has never been healed.”
He speaks from clinical experience. Del Castillo earned a master’s degree focused on post-traumatic stress disorder and spent 10 years working with Vietnam veterans.
Midway through, he asked the room for 30 seconds of silence to honor one of his teachers, Ernesto Alvarado, an Apache medicine man who held a doctorate in educational psychology. At a 1973 conference, del Castillo recalled, Alvarado told him, “Ramon, activism is one effective remedio to heal our wounded souls.”
“I didn’t realize this until I entered the field of mental health, that while we were active, we were actually healing ourselves,” del Castillo said. “It was our refugio.”
He tied the idea to Pueblo. During the Chicano movement, social workers at the state hospital here confronted psychiatrists whose Western models ignored their patients’ culture. Del Castillo recalled their demand: “Let us develop our own medicine. Let us build our own refugio.” Their pressure pushed mental health systems in the region toward culturally competent care.
Grants aimed at the region’s workers and students
Jesus Jaime-Diaz, director of the Aztlán Research Center, announced the 2027 faculty research grant recipients. Each award carries $2,000. The center funds applied research tied to southern Colorado and the Southwest.
“Our commitment is to raise a content-specific awareness of our community and appreciation for its legacy of struggle and strength,” Jaime-Diaz said.
Alegría Ribadeneira and Alexandra Perez will co-author an open educational resource in Spanish for a course titled Career Readiness for the Bilingual Professional.
Himadri Sen Gupta will build a tool pairing AI heat prediction with scheduling for Chicana and Chicano agricultural communities in the Southwest. The system turns weather data into safe work schedules for farm workers.
Refugio in the classroom
Jaime-Diaz returned to the theme when he spoke about teaching. Refugio, in his framing, belongs in the classroom. He told the audience it matters for people to understand their own background, and for classrooms to make room for students to express it. A classroom run that way becomes a safe space, where students bring their families, languages, and histories through the door instead of leaving them outside.
At a Hispanic Serving Institution where many students are the first in their families to attend college, the effort is even more important. The Spanish-language course materials Ribadeneira and Perez will build follow the same idea, putting students’ home language at the center of career preparation.
The lobby outside the ballroom showed what the idea looks like beyond campus. Vendors sold handmade crafts, and people lingered to talk. Amaurante Montez, an Indigenous artist, independent filmmaker, and publisher, came at the invitation of del Castillo, an old friend. It was his second year at the Institute.
His table held jewelry built from bone, stone, horn, shell, and silver, including one piece set with a buffalo tooth.
Montez also brought new coloring books built from ancient drawings, redrawn for young readers today. The books put Indigenous imagery back into the hands of children and families, as a way to learn their background through their own images. It is a quiet form of the activism del Castillo described from the podium.
Asked what guides him, Montez pointed to a single rule. “We didn’t have 10 commandments,” he said. “Respect is the one commandment. Wherever you go in the world, if you have respect, you’re going to survive and get by.”
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