About the Latinx Lab

Funded by a 3-year Mellon Foundation grant, the Latinx Lab for Storytelling and Social Justice is a series of projects, both in-person and virtual, led by faculty in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at CSUF. These projects center storytelling as essential to creating vital and transformative knowledge.

The Latinx Lab aims to inspire our students to use storytelling to uncover marginalized stories and experiences and share their own narratives while building community and engaging in social activism. Our students’ stories are more important now than ever to address structural racism, to find healing, to imagine more just futures and to forge new compassionate and joyful relationships and experiences.

Unlike traditional labs that are often organized within the sciences, we are inspired by the mission of the Mellon Foundation to establish a lab focusing on the humanities and arts as its foundation. Our vision is that oral, sonic, visual, and written storytelling and narratives are fundamental to understanding and addressing social justice problems that deeply affect Latinx communities. We believe that the humanities, namely, the study and creation of art, culture, history, and literature within our Chicana/o Studies department is vital for understanding and creating Latinx experiences and expression.

About the Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.