Adminstration Admin

¡Chicanísima! — June 27 at MACLA, San José What does it mean to set a living person's life to music? And what does it feel like to hear your own story sung? In this rare and intimate conversation, composer Carla Lucero and Chicana activist Olga Talamante sit down together to discuss the making of ¡Chicanísima! — and the extraordinary life that inspired it. Olga speaks candidly about her years of activism, her arrest and imprisonment in Argentina, and what it meant to come home. Carla reflects...

The 1975 poster by Malaquías Montoya and its connection to Opera Cultura's ¡Chicanísima! In the spring of 1975, Olga Talamante was sitting in an Argentine prison. Her community was fighting for her release. One of the people who answered that call was Malaquías Montoya — a major figure in the Chicano Art Movement, raised by a single mother in a family of migrant farmworkers in California's Central Valley. His story and Olga's were cut from the same cloth. HISTORY Montoya created a silkscreen...

She Went to Change the World By the time Olga Talamante graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in Latin American Studies, she had already spent years organizing — with MEChA, with the United Farm Workers, with Chicana Consciousness, a group of activists who explored leadership, gender, and power within the Chicano movement. She was twenty-three years old and deeply curious about the connections between the struggles she knew at home and those happening across the Americas. While doing...