Please join us for a special Research as Praxis Speaker Series event on Tuesday, February 24 from 12:30–2:00pm. We will gather in the Haas Center DK Room at noon for a talk by Gina Hernandez (lunch will be served), followed by a short walk to Casa Zapata for a guided tour of the murals!

Please RSVP to attend. This event is open to students, staff and faculty.

In this talk and tour, Gina Hernandez, '89, MLA '23, reflects on her research on an extensive collection of murals and large-scale wall paintings produced between 1975 and 1989 at Casa Zapata—an undergraduate, ethnic-themed residence at Stanford University. These works, created in rapid succession over a 15-year period coincided with the height of the Chicano Movement, a cultural and political mobilization determined to advance the equality, civil rights, and education for Mexican and Latino populations in the United States. Central to the movement was an identity formation that forwarded the indigenous origins of Mexico and the Southwest United States. The concept of survivance, introduced by scholar Gerald Vizenor, refers to the stance, posture, and means through which agency in Native peoples’ stories is advanced. Visual survivance identifies elements of Chicano political activism, collective creation, and self-determination as closely aligned with these notions of survivance.

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Bio

Gina Hernandez has served in a variety of roles at Stanford University––as founding Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Director of Arts in Undergraduate Education, and Director of Community Engaged Learning from 2001-2025. In such roles she contributed to the launch of a variety of programs in the Arts including the Stanford Arts Intensive; Creative Expression Undergraduate Requirement and Cartographies of Race: Mapping Race & Space in California. Hernandez is an alumna of Stanford with both bachelor's and master's degrees and also holds a master’s in fine arts from U.C.L.A’s School of Theater, Film & Television. Hernandez currently serves on the boards of Craft in America and the Stanford Historical Society