Lea la versión en español - Procesión
2025 Procession / Performance
" Raíces y Resistencia: Storytelling as Legacy and Liberation"
This performance-procession is a living altar, a moving invocation of Latino ancestral and cultural storytelling traditions—oral histories, testimonio, dichos, folk practices, songs, prayers, and incantations—brought to life through voice, movement, rhythm, and ceremony. These expressive forms have long served as vessels of memory, identity, and intergenerational wisdom across Latino communities.
Each step of the procession embodies a different form of storytelling, unfolding like pages of a communal book written across generations. Participants become both carriers and creators of memory, enacting the wisdom of abuelas and the defiance of those who resisted silence. This is not just performance—it is reclamation, remembrance, and resistance.
- The Opening: Invocation of the Ancestors A circle forms. Drums pulse. A collective prayer rises in Spanish, Nahuatl, and English. Offerings are placed—corn, feathers, photos, handwritten stories. An elder steps forward to share a testimonio, grounding the space in truth.
- The Procession Begins Slow, intentional steps. Along the path, voices echo dichos and proverbs, called and responded to like sacred riddles. “Camarón que se duerme…” “¡Se lo lleva la corriente!” The crowd becomes a call-and-response chorus of survival.
- Stations of Memory and Resistance At different intervals, the procession pauses for embodied storytelling. One station reimagines a curandera’s ritual, another features a song passed down from migrant laborers, sung by youth in harmony. Stories of exile, joy, rage, and faith are woven into the air through chant and dance.
- Language as Spell, Sound as Spirit Spoken word artists emerge, reciting incantations—half poem, half prayer. Words spiral into drums, into clapping, into feet stomping ancestral rhythms. This is palabra viva—living word. The air thick with smoke and breath and sound.
- The Gathering: Collective Offering At the end, participants contribute something to a shared altar: a written memory, a whispered story, a note to an ancestor. A final communal chant rises, affirming that cultural storytelling is not a relic—it is alive, a powerful tool of survival, resilience, and resistance.
- Intercessors: Makuill Ollin Ocelotl, Aztec Dance Calpulli
- Grand Marshals: Bel Hernandez and Enrique Castillo, 2025 Annual César E. Chávez Memorial Breakfast Padrinos de Honor
Participate in the Procession
Please contact:
Dr. Aurora Vilchis
LEAD Planner
Office Phone: (909) 537-4457
Email: vilchis@csusb.edu
*Complimentary parking, continental and lunch will be provided. Procession will be webcast/broadcast across our various media outlets and partners. Participants would need to arrive on the Cal State San Bernardino campus by 7:45 AM in order to park, and check-in at the Santos Manuel Student Union so as to line up for the Procession.