Rosa Clemente

More than 90% of enslaved Africans landed in what is today known as Latin America and the Caribbean via the Trans Atlantic Slave trade. The presence of our ancestors is still felt and maintained throughout these regions, including in the United States. Black Latinx/African descendants and people(s) are part of the broader Black community’s cultural and historical landscape in the United States. Contemporary migration patterns of Afro-descended people throughout the Americas have created complex and diverse definitions of Blackness. Through the lens of Hip-hop, social justice and Black and Brown freedom struggles, this lecture or workshop discusses these diverse and complex experiences in an effort to illuminate intersections and findings about the experiences of people throughout the African Diaspora. In this keynote or workshop, Rosa engages with various topics and geographic locations to center Black Latinx and African descendant voices in service of providing historical context and contemporary realities about race, representation, and power within the U.S. Rosa, a voice of the Hip-Hop generation, draws from 30 years of movement building, third-party electoral politics, and independent journalism, weaving in her personal narrative with the histories and experiences of ancestors, elders, contemporaries, peers, and future generations.

What is equity in higher education? What does it mean and what does it look like? In this talk, Rosa Clemente lays bare the inequities that exist on college campuses across race, ethnicity, and gender. She discusses the varied ways inequality shows up, including in institutional structures, policies and procedures, resource allocation, academic equity and access, curriculum and pedagogy, hiring and promotion, and campus climate and culture. She shares a framework to advance anti-racism strategies across college campuses and offers tools to help create more diverse and inclusive educational spaces.

When the category 4 Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017, it devastated the archipelago. The storm claimed the lives of more than 2,975 people, destroyed more than 70,000 homes, caused more than $94.4 billion in damages, and led to the biggest migration of Puerto Ricans from the archipelago to the contiguous U.S. in history. Just days after the natural disaster, Rosa Clemente put together a team of young Latinx journalists, filmmakers, and media producers who went to the archipelago to report on the catastrophe. There, the team uncovered all the unnatural storms that contributed to the devastation, like colonialism, disaster capitalism, and political corruption, among more. In this talk, Rosa discusses the legacy of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, how this colonial relationship led to the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and how to make a nation.

In 2008, the United States made political history — and not just because it was the year the country elected its first Black president. The year also marks another first: In 2008, two Black women ran for the highest offices in the country, Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney and her vice presidential running mate Rosa Clemente. In this talk, Rosa Clemente discusses her historic run for Vice President of the United States as an Afro-Puerto Rican woman and the need to move beyond two-party politics in order to fix democracy in America.

We the people build power through community organizing, and in this workshop, Rosa Clemente shows us how. By examining the history of select social justice movements of the last 50 years and sharing the speaker’s personal narratives as an organizer, scholar-activist, and independent journalist, Rosa shows audiences how building movements provides space for people to work together for a common social, political, and cultural goal. She also outlines how to move from social media moments and viral hashtags to decentralized movements. What is needed for an idea of the few to be transformed to an idea of many? How do we build movements that are non-hierarchical? How do we make sure these organizing efforts are inclusive of the multiple identities that we all carry? The workshop will provide tools that we use to inspire and engage young people to become community activists and organizers.