Aquetza

Aquetza: Youth Leadership, Education and Community Empowerment is a FREE residential summer program that will be taking place at CU-Boulder and in communities across Colorado from July 8-22, 2022 In Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica/Aztec indigenous people of central and northern Mexico,“aquetza” translates as “to lift your chin up.” This was chosen with great intention, and embodies what the Aquetza summer program is all about: Empowering youth with strong ties to Chicana/o/x communities to learn to see themselves as community leaders with their own unique Precious Knowledge. A joint project between members of Colorado's Chicana/o community and UMAS y MEChA de CU-Boulder, our primary goal is to provide a space where youth participants, counselors, instructional staff, and community members are given the opportunity to build relationships, deepen their academic knowledge and skills, learn about social change, interrogate their cultural identities, explore their communities, and articulate a vision of themselves as scholars and community leaders. We do this by providing high school students from across Colorado with an experience focused on examining the history, literature, health, sciences, and the socio-political issues surrounding our communities. Our approach seeks to draw upon the historical, intellectual, and creative activism history of Colorado’s Chicana/o and Latina/o communities, as well as community based skills around organizing and the arts. In this way, Aquetza will produce youth who have a fundamentally new relationship to academics and schooling, and who are prepared to take up servant-leadership roles in their communities. Staff support High school students from across Colorado as we engage with…
-Healing, Identity work and Organizing
-Decolonial pedagogical approaches as we examine Literature, History, & Science
-Testimonio, Personal story-telling, Teatro, Spoken word, visual and performing arts
-Creative & analytical writing
-College counseling & support
-Encuentro performances to significant crowds

Our goals for the youth we serve include:
-Develop an identity as a current and future community organizer/activist
-Engage with the world as it is, and imagine the world as it could be.
-Enhance the relationship between students, the community and the university
-Create new outlets for artistic and personal expression
-Build networks for future organizing work with youth across the state
-Come to see themselves as holders and producers of new and valuable knowledge with the tools to become leaders for positive social change in their communities.
-Gain a new understanding of how academic subjects connect to one another, to cultura, and to the world in which we live

Applications for 2022 will open early in February. Online Application: http://www.colorado.edu/aquetza/aquetza-application