LEAD Summit 2026 Program
"LEAD Summit 15ñera for Justice: Divina Juventud: From Innocence to Resistance"
LEAD Summit XV
Program Detail
- Red Carpet Interviews - Jeannette Sandoval & Alejandro Ramos-Barajas
- Entertainment / Saludo Artistico - Dee Jay MJ
- Tlamanalli Community Altar (Ofrenda prehispánica Miccailhuitl) - Association of Latino Faculty, Staff and Students in collaboration with Makuill Ollin Ocelotl-Circulo de Danza Azteca
- *Attendees are invited to place photos, flowers, or written tributes on the community ofrenda honoring ancestors, educators, and activists. Attendees are also invited to upload photos onto the digital Altar.
- Land Acknowledgement - TBD
- Color Guard Presentation - Air Force Junior ROTC, Redlands HS
- Pledge of Allegiance - Capt. Jesus Acuña-Perez (Ret)
- U.S. National Anthem – TBD, possibly Aryanna Ruiz, Coyote Achieve Academic Coach, CSUSB Office of Academic Success and Undergraduate Advising
- Invocation - Very Rev. Msgr. Gerard M. Lopez, STL, Vicar General, Diocese of San Bernardino
- Intercessors: Makuill Ollin Ocelotl, Aztec Dance Calpulli
- Grand Marshals: TBD
- Music: Chaparrón Norteño
“Calling the Directions, Calling the Spirits”: An intergenerational blessing invoking the cuatro rumbos (four directions) and the ancestors, accompanied by danza Azteca and drums.
“La Marcha de la 15ñera: From Innocence to Resistance”: A ceremonial procession blending Día de los Muertos imagery with quinceañera ritual — featuring youth leaders carrying marigolds, protest banners, past LEAD Summit posters, and candles representing fifteen years of struggle and transformation.
- TBD
President (or interim), California State University, San Bernardino - Dr. Chinaka S. DomNwachukwu
Dean, James R. Watson and Judy Rodriguez Watson College of Education, California State University, San Bernardino - TBD LEAD XV Padrinos de Honor
This keynote centers the sacred act of passing the palabra — the intergenerational transmission of truth, memory, and responsibility — grounded in our Ancestral Integrity (AI). In a time shaped by disinformation and disconnection, this address calls us back to the wisdom of our ancestors as a living guide for justice, leadership, and collective healing.
Framed by the spirit of the 15ñera and Día de los Muertos, this session honors the voices that came before us — elders, educators, organizers, and cultural bearers — whose teachings continue to shape our path. The altar becomes not only a site of remembrance, but a bridge: where stories, values, and visions are carried forward into the hearts and hands of the next generation.
Our featured speaker invites us to understand Ancestral Integrity as both grounding and direction — a compass rooted in culture, accountability, and community. Here, youth are not passive recipients, but active carriers of the palabra: storytellers, truth-tellers, and architects of justice who inherit not only struggle, but purpose.
This session calls us to reflect:
What does it mean to carry the palabra with integrity in this moment?
How do we ensure that ancestral knowledge is not lost, but lived?
In what ways can youth transform inherited wisdom into collective action?
Blending reflection, storytelling, and ceremonial intention, this keynote sets the tone for the day — reminding us that the future of justice depends on how we honor the past, how we live in the present, and how we prepare the next generation to lead with courage, clarity, and corazón.
- Introduction/Moderator: TBD
- Featured Speaker: Maestro Jerry Tello, Award Winning Author, Storyteller, Healing Practitioner, and LEAD Summit XV Padrino de Honor
This panel of educators, students, advocates, and activists discusses decolonizing pedagogy, truth-telling, and protecting students’ civic voices.
In a time when truth is contested and classrooms have become battlegrounds of ideology, this panel explores education as one of the last sacred spaces of resistance. “Educación como Resistencia” invites educators, students, advocates, and activists to confront the growing assault on truth, history, and civic consciousness — and to reclaim the classroom as a site of liberation rather than indoctrination.
Drawing from traditions of critical pedagogy, ethnic studies, testimonio, and community-based learning, panelists will discuss what it means to teach and learn with courage, compassion, and cultural memory in the age of disinformation. From book bans to algorithmic bias, they will examine how misinformation shapes public understanding and how educators can equip students to navigate — and challenge — false narratives.
This conversation moves beyond academic theory into lived praxis: how teachers can transform lessons into acts of social justice, how advocates and activists can center truth over spectacle, and how youth can reclaim their civic voices.
In the spirit of the 15ñera and Día de los Muertos, this panel honors the educators who have come before — those who kept the flame of consciousness alive — while empowering a new generation to carry that torch forward. Education becomes both altar and battlefield, where every lesson is an offering to truth and every act of teaching is a declaration of resistance.
- Chair/Moderator: Josefina E. Canchola, Director of Secondary Programs and Partnerships - Puente Project, Vice President of the Board of Trustees - Whittier Union High School District, and LEAD Summit XV Madrina de Honor
- Panelist: TBD - Puente
- Panelist: TBD - Puente
- Panelist: TBD - Puente
This panel of youth writers, poets, and cultural workers explore storytelling as resurrection — how words, music, and art keep our communities alive.
In the tradition of Dr. Tomás Rivera — whose words carved pathways for generations of storytellers — this featured panel gathers youth writers, poets, and cultural workers to explore storytelling as resurrection. In a world quick to erase, silence, or distort the voices of marginalized communities, these artists remind us that through language, rhythm, and imagination, we remain ni muertos ni vencidos — neither dead nor defeated.
Anchored in the spirit of Día de los Muertos, this session transforms the stage into a living altar of voices. Each poem, lyric, and narrative becomes an offering — a candle lit for memory, a song for survival, a story that refuses to be buried. Through bilingual and bicultural expression, panelists will illuminate how art becomes both archive and uprising: how words stitched in two tongues can heal, how memory becomes a political act, and how creative resistance ensures that our ancestors’ struggles are never forgotten.
The conversation invites the audience to consider how cultural expression — from spoken word to corrido, mural to podcast — keeps our communities alive across generations and geographies. It celebrates art as a form of collective memory, one that carries the heartbeat of our pueblos forward even as we confront the erasures of coloniality and modern amnesia.
In the LEAD Summit 15ñera for Justice, this panel embodies the theme of Divina Juventud — youth as sacred keepers of story, guardians of language, and architects of cultural rebirth. Through Rivera’s legacy and their own lived truths, these emerging voices proclaim that while empires may fall silent, the people’s song continues — eternal, luminous, and unbroken.
- Chair/Moderator: Kirk Whisler, President - Empowering Latino Futures
- Panelist: TBD - Empowering Latino Futures
- Panelist: TBD - Empowering Latino Futures
- Panelist: TBD - Empowering Latino Futures
* Dr. Tomás Rivera (December 22, 1935 – May 16, 1984) was a Mexican American author, poet, and educator. As an author, Rivera is best remembered for his 1971 Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness novella ...y no se lo tragó la tierra, translated into English variously as This Migrant Earth and as ...and the Earth Did Not Devour Him. This book won the first Premio Quinto Sol award. From 1979 until his death in 1984, he was the chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, the first Mexican American to hold such a position at the University of California.
As the day reaches its culmination, this Capstone Presentation centers In Tloque Nahuaque — the understanding that all is interconnected, that we exist in sacred relationship with one another across generations, histories, and futures. This session becomes a living embodiment of that principle, bringing together Elders (52+), Yelders (27–51), and Youth (under 26) in a collective dialogue on justice, healing, and continuity.
Featuring one panelist from each generational circle, this intergenerational conversation reflects the full arc of movement-building: wisdom carried, knowledge practiced, and vision emerging. Elders ground us in ancestral memory and lived experience; Yelders bridge tradition and transformation through leadership and action; and Youth ignite the future with creativity, urgency, and unapologetic truth. Together, they model what it means to move not in isolation, but in relationship — accountable to past, present, and future.
This capstone, like a collective rite of passage, is more than a panel; it is a ceremonial convergence where story, testimony, and reflection become offerings to our collective altar. It honors fifteen years of the LEAD Summit’s legacy while expanding its vision — reminding us that justice work is not linear, but cyclical, relational, and deeply spiritual. Here, healing is not separate from resistance; it is the foundation that sustains it.
Guided by the spirit of the 15ñera and Día de los Muertos, this session calls us to reflect:
How do we remain rooted in ancestral knowledge while responding to present realities?
What responsibilities do we carry to those who came before and those yet to come?
How do we build movements that are not only effective, but sustaining, loving, and whole?
As the marigolds glow and the drums call us into unity, this presentation becomes a collective vow — to walk in balance, to lead with integrity, and to remain in right relationship with one another. It closes the 15ñera not as an ending, but as a renewal: a declaration that we are interconnected, that we are accountable to each other, and that our intergenerational movement for justice and healing continues — rooted, rising, and unbroken.
- Chair/Moderator: TBD
- Panelist: Maestro Jerry Tello, Award Winning Author, Storyteller, Healing Practitioner, and LEAD Summit XV Padrino de Honor
- Panelist: Josefina E. Canchola, Director of Secondary Programs and Partnerships - Puente Project, Vice President of the Board of Trustees - Whittier Union High School District, and LEAD Summit XV Madrina de Honor
- Panelist: TBD -Youth
- Panelist: TBD - Youth