Wednesday, March 30th, 2022 from 12:00-1:30pm PST

Join scholar and Chacruna member Diana Negrín and journalist/author Roberto Lovato in a wide-ranging discussion exploring the challenges and opportunities for BAY AREA AND OTHER communities of color as they and all of us face the advent of legalized psychedelics. There’s nowhere better in the US to study whether and how the coming psychedelic-industrial complex will strip hallucinogenic drugs of their historical and religious significance/the historical and religious significance of hallucinogens while creating new forms of ecological extraction. Join us for this exciting discussion about the psychedelic past, present and future in the historic Bay Area.

📷Diana Negrín is a geographer, writer and curator based in the Bay Area and Guadalajara. She is the author of Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism and the Right to the Mexican City (University of Arizona Press 2019) and Grandes maestros del arte wixárika (Secretaría de Cultura Jalisco; Wixarika Research Center 2019). Currently, Negrín is a professor in Geography and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and in the Urban and Public Affairs program at the University of San Francisco. She is the Associate Director of Chacruna Mexico and helps run the Wixarika Research Center, a non-profit that supports archival, cultural and ecological projects with Wixarika communities. Since 2018, Negrín has actively participated in discussions surrounding psychedelics, Indigenous territorial rights and cultural extraction.

📷Roberto Lovato is the author of Unforgetting (Harper Collins), a “groundbreaking” memoir the New York Times picked as an “Editor’s Choice”  and hailed as a “kaleidoscopic montage that is at once a family saga, a coming-of-age story and a meditation on the vicissitudes of history, community and, most of all for [Lovato], identity.”  Newsweek listed Lovato’s memoir as a “must read” 2020 book and the Los Angeles Times listed it as one of its 20 Best Books of 2020. Lovato is also an educator, journalist and writer based at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco, California. As a Co-Founder of #DignidadLiteraria, he helped build a movement advocating for equity and literary justice for the more than 60 million Latinx persons left off of bookshelves in the United States and out of the national dialogue. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has reported on numerous issues—violence, terrorism, the drug war and the refugee crisis—from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, France and the United States, among other countries. Lovato a lifelong resident of San Francisco’s Mission and Outer Mission neighborhoods, where he was first exposed to mind-altering substances during the “second (psychedelic) wave” of the 60s and 70s.

This talk will be recorded and immediately available for rewatch for all attendees.

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The Gentrification of Consciousness: A Bay Area Perspective