As President of the Society for Mexican American Philosophy (SMAP), Associate Professor Alejandro Santana and his fellow board members felt a need to bring SMAP members together. With the last conference taking place in 2017 at Texas A&M University, Santana and SMAP board members began to plan the 2025 Summer Institute.
Co-sponsored by the ethnic studies department, the Garaventa Center, the Dundon-Berchtold Institute and the local non-profit organization Indigenous People’s Power Project, SMAP will host the first biannual Summer Institute at UP from June 6 to 8.
Student volunteers include members from the Philosophy Club, the Native American Alliance (NAA), the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) and the Latinx Student Union (LSU).
The Institute aims to bring together SMAP members from the U.S., Canada and Mexico to discuss their work and help guide one another through shared experiences as Mexican American professors and academics.
“When it comes to publications, editing journals, translating texts, doing community organizing, [these] things that often are not discussed in graduate school or often not — people don't really get any training in that sort of thing,” Santana said. “But often is the case that people in our field, in our sub-discipline of Mexican American philosophy, we're kind of called to do [that].”
According to Santana, the tentative itinerary includes a panel on immigration, a workshop on philosophy and action where attendees can engage in community service on or off campus and a panel on indigeneity.
Davíd Carrasco, a Harvard Divinity School-based Mesoamericanist scholar, anthropologist and historian, is set to be this year’s keynote speaker. Carrasco is best known for his research on Mesoamerican religion and history. At the Institute, he will deliver a talk titled “Waiting for the Dawn: Finding Aztlán in the Mirror of Philosophy.”
According to Santana, the Institute aims to engage attendees in academia and bring them together in the community. To promote this, the SMAP board plans to dedicate one day of the Institute to an off-campus excursion.
While community building is just one of the many things Santana looks forward to in the Institute, he believes it sets it apart from other conferences he has attended. By having the Institute take place on campus, Santana hopes UP students can integrate with the greater SMAP community.
“The hope is, is to use [the excursion] as time for people to build community and get to know each other and just have free time to ideate all kinds of things that that people can do to work together and to find some commonalities and ways for people to build and associate with each other,” Santana said. “That often doesn't happen during a conference.”
Tiffany Marquez Escobar is the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Editor for The Beacon. She can be reached at marqueze25@up.edu.
