This day-long event featured presentations by professors, youth organizers, politically active youth, and students. “Civically Engaged Youth in the Americas: A Three City Perspective - Chicago, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro” stems from a larger comparative study researching the role of youth in public spaces in each of their cities. The three themes of the colloquium include Becoming, Engaging, and Envisioning - here academics, youth organizers, and youth themselves speak on envisioning what’s next, beginning with a remarkable reading by Cristína Correa.

Cristína Correa is a writer who has worked with Young Chicago Authors, Young People For the American Way, and After School Matters teaching reality through the guise of poetry. She studies at Columbia College Chicago and works at Naïveté Studios. Her concern is with the barely audible voices that gurgle beneath the din of current affairs. In August, she made a trip to Southern Africa to study under Prexy Nesbitt, local educators and socially active youth. Her voice pulses with the blood of all she deems ancestry. In honor of this and all voices, she works to maintain strong artist communities around the world.  For more of her work, visit her website.

Jaclyn Vega-Rodríguez is a student at UIC majoring in both Anthropology and Teaching of History.  She began organizing with the Mexican Students de Aztlan almost three years ago. She has been involved with many projects, campaigns and events including Escucha Mi Grito Conferences, Dia de los Muertos, Coaliton of Immokalee Worker’s McDonalds Campaign and Zapatista Solidarity. She also does much work with a community-based group of individuals called ChicagOtra, a Zapatista Solidarity group that is adherent to La Sexta Declaracion de la Selva Lacondona and The Other Campaign On The Other Side.

Janéida Rivera is a member of the collective of Batey Urbano and an active member of the Puerto Rican community. She has been working with us for over a year, almost two actually. She is very articulate and is a graduate of PACHS. She grew up in Humboldt Park and one of her poems made it into the Chicago Tribune.

James Block is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at DePaul Univeristy.

Facilitated by David Stovall, Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies/College of Education and African-American Studies/College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His scholarship investigates the intersection of race, class, and gender in education. Although his work incorporates originates from a sociological perspective, his approach is multi-disciplinary in that involves historical, legal, anthropological, and philosophical data to inform his qualitative methodological approach.

Recorded Thursday, September 20, 2007 at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.