Program | LEAD Summit XIV

LEAD Summit 2026 Program

"LEAD Summit 15ñera for Justice: Divina Juventud: From Innocence to Resistance"

LEAD Summit XV

Friday, October 16th, 2026

8:00 am - 2:00 pm

Santos Manuel Student Union – South

California State University, San Bernardino

Program Detail

• Master of Ceremony (Stage): Dr. Enrique G. Murillo, Jr. Professor of Education, and LEAD Executive Director, CSUSB

• Announcer (Expo & Lobby): Prof. Elias Escamilla, Assistant Professor, Counselor, Mt. San Jacinto Community College

• Webcast Director / Producer: James Trotter, Director, Multimedia & Immersive Technologies, CSUSB

• Stage Manager, Robert Garcia, Former Associate Director, Technology Services, Palm Desert Campus, CSUSB

8:00 AM: Check-In / DJ Music / Live Interviews / Ofrenda Installation

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.

9:00 AM: Procession / Performance

Intercessors: Makuill Ollin Ocelotl, Aztec Dance Calpulli
Grand Marshals: TBD

“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.

9:45 AM: Morning Featured Speaker – “Democracy’s Funeral and the Rebirth of Justice: Youth at the Crossroads”

This address explores the collapse of civic trust and the sacred duty of divina juventud to rebuild democracy through activism, art, and imagination.

As the marigolds of remembrance frame our collective altar, this keynote invites us to stand at the symbolic crossroads between mourning and movement — between what democracy was promised to be and what justice demands it become.

In the spirit of the 15ñera and Día de los Muertos, “Democracy’s Funeral and the Rebirth of Justice” acknowledges that the systems once believed to protect truth, equality, and the public good are in crisis — hollowed by disinformation, apathy, and the erosion of civic trust. Yet, even amid this funeral procession, the youth carry candles instead of eulogies.

Our featured speaker calls upon divina juventud — the sacred energy of young visionaries, students, artists, and organizers — to transform grief into action. Through the eyes of youth, democracy is not buried but reborn, reimagined as something more inclusive, participatory, and rooted in lived justice.

This session challenges us to ask:

What does it mean to inherit a democracy in decay?
How do young people become the midwives of a new civic imagination?
What rituals, stories, and solidarities must we resurrect to sustain hope?

Blending truth-telling, reflection, and poetic urgency, this keynote sets the emotional and intellectual tone for the day — reminding us that funerals can also be sites of transformation, that from the ashes of disillusionment rises a new generation determined to breathe life into justice.

Introduction/Moderator: TBD
Featured Speaker: TBD, possibly Maestro Jerry Tello

10:15 AM: Break / Networking & Vendor - Exhibits Fair / Community Altar

Community organizations, vendors, publishers, artists, and youth collectives present cultural and educational resources.
TBD - collaborate with Empowering Latino Futures (Kirk Whisler & Melissa Lopez) to make the LEAD Summit Vendor / Exhibits Fair an extension of the Latino Book & Family Festival.
Red Carpet Interviews - Jeannette Sandoval & Alejandro Ramos-Barajas
Entertainment - Dee Jay MJ
Community Altar – ALFSS & Makuill Ollin Ocelotl

10:30 AM: Puente Panel – “Educación como Resistencia: Teaching and Learning for Liberation in the Age of Disinformation”

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: TBD - Puente
Panelist: TBD - Puente
Panelist: TBD - Puente
Panelist: TBD - Puente

11:15 AM: Dr. Tomás Rivera Featured Panel – “Ni Muertos Ni Vencidos: Memory, Language, and Cultural Survival”

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: TBD - 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.

12:00 PM: Lunch & Networking / Vendor & Exhibits Fair / Community Altar

Community organizations, vendors, publishers, artists, and youth collectives present cultural and educational resources.
TBD - collaborate with Empowering Latino Futures (Kirk Whisler & Melissa Lopez) to make the LEAD Summit Vendor / Exhibits Fair an extension of the Latino Book & Family Festival.
Red Carpet Interviews - Jeannette Sandoval & Alejandro Ramos-Barajas
Entertainment - Dee Jay MJ
Community Altar – ALFSS & Makuill Ollin Ocelotl

12:45 PM: Afternoon Featured Speaker - “Divina Juventud: Rise, Reflect, Rejoice, Resist, and Reimagine”

In a moment when democracy trembles under the weight of lies, fear, and forgetfulness, this address calls us to witness the sacred energy of youth — divina juventud — not as an age, but as a spirit: fierce, radiant, and alive.

We are invited to look to young people — students, artists, organizers, dreamers — as the architects of a new democratic imagination. Here, youth are not merely “the future” but the moral compass of the present, guiding us from the shadows of grief into the light of collective power.

“Divina Juventud: Rise, Reflect, Rejoice, Resist, and Reimagine” embodies the transformation from victim to visionary, from mourning to movement. It honors those who came before — teachers, elders, ancestors — while lifting up the next generation as sacred defenders of justice, truth, and dignity. Through stories of struggle and triumph, the featured speaker will illuminate how today’s youth confront disinformation with creativity, apathy with art, and despair with action.

This is a call to reclaim the divine within resistance — to see joy as rebellion, knowledge as weapon, and love as the fiercest form of power. Echoing the spirit of the 15ñera, this moment celebrates fifteen years of struggle and awakening with a declaration: “Divina Juventud — sacred, angry, alive.” “From innocence to resistance — we are the 15ñera for justice.”

The Afternoon Featured Speaker guides us through the final stage of the 15ñera’s rite of passage — from reflection to rebirth, from democracy’s funeral to the dawn of a new civic imagination. It is not only a keynote; it is a blessing, a challenge, and a celebration of the unstoppable light of youth.

Introduction/Moderator: TBD
Featured Speaker: TBD

1:15 PM: Capstone Presentation – “The 15ñera for Justice: Our Collective Rite of Passage”

As the day reaches its crescendo, the Capstone Presentation serves as the symbolic coronation of the LEAD Summit 15ñera — a moment when fifteen years of struggle, scholarship, and solidarity converge into a single, collective heartbeat. This is more than a closing session; it is a rite of passage for Chicano/Latino consciousness — the turning point from youthful optimism (Innocence) to critical civic resistance (Resistance) in an era some have called “Democracy’s Funeral.”

Led by youth voices, artists, and emerging leaders, “The 15ñera for Justice: Our Collective Rite of Passage” celebrates a new generation redefining leadership, beauty, and activism in the 21st century. It is a ceremony of transformation — where grief becomes growth, where disillusionment gives birth to imagination, and where the divine fire of juventud ignites a new covenant of justice.

This presentation honors fifteen years of the LEAD Summit’s legacy — its power to gather thinkers, teachers, and dreamers who dare to question and rebuild. Through performance, testimony, and digital storytelling, participants will explore the major frontiers of our shared struggle.

Echoing the rhythm of Día de los Muertos, this youth-led presentation breathes life into what has been buried — restoring faith in democracy through the rituals of joy, resistance, and community. It reminds us that protest can also be celebration, that organizing with joy is an act of survival, and that storytelling itself is a sacred rebellion.

As the marigolds glow and drums call us to unity, this capstone becomes a collective vow — a promise to carry forward the lessons of fifteen years into the next fifteen and beyond. It closes the 15ñera for Justice not with farewell, but with renewal.

A declaration that we are still here, still rising, still imagining. That from innocence to resistance, we have come of age together. That the 15ñera is not just one moment — it is a movement.

Chair/Moderator: TBD
Panelist: TBD
Panelist: TBD
Panelist: TBD