placed<\/a> on administrative leave in August, Meza, alongside CLSD staff and the ethnic studies department, have been scrambling to pick up the pieces.<\/p>\nThe Chicanx Latinx Leadership Seminar, a DeCal course Gallegos-Diaz taught alongside students, was canceled last week, according to Emma Enr\u00edquez, an administrative assistant for the CLSD office and an ASUC senator endorsed by the Latine community. Enr\u00edquez said it\u2019s the biggest and one of the oldest seminars that CLSD runs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a course where students had no idea that it was going to be canceled at all,\u201d Enr\u00edquez said. She says many students found out it was canceled when they showed up for class. \u201cIt just kind of has put us at a halt, because now we have to completely reimagine what that programming looks like, and how we\u2019re going to be able to push that out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Enr\u00edquez says students were \u201cdevastated\u201d and many had to scramble to find new units to take just days before the deadline to add classes without a fee.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s also been working with the seminar\u2019s instruction team to turn the course\u2019s content into a series of workshops, the first of which will begin Sept. 16.<\/p>\n
Lorena Oropeza, chair of the department of ethnic studies, said the class was canceled because she could not find another available instructor whose qualifications matched those of Gallegos-Diaz.<\/p>\n
Gallegos-Diaz also taught a first-year seminar for students in the Casa Magdalena Mora Theme Program, a housing theme program for Latine students. Though this course wasn\u2019t canceled, Meza, a graduate student fellow for the Casa Program, says he\u2019s struggling without Gallegos-Diaz.<\/p>\n
\u201cLupe really is the person that we would go to for advice on the curriculum, for advice on how we should navigate the week\u2019s seminar, the conversations that we should have,\u201d Meza said. \u201cNow that Lupe is gone, it\u2019s kind of like, who do we lean to?\u201d<\/p>\n
Without Gallegos-Diaz, Meza says the CLSD office\u2019s small staff is \u201coverwhelmed\u201d by her responsibilities. According to Enr\u00edquez, Lupe was the faculty sponsor for the CLSD-run DeCals and managed the collection of most of the center\u2019s funding.<\/p>\n
Meza added that CLSD has also had to pause its annual Sharing Wisdoms Across Generations event \u2014 a weekend career event connecting Casa Program students to Latine-identifying alumni \u2014 because Gallegos-Diaz was so vital to running the event.<\/p>\n
Faculty, community members and students such as Meza and Garcia have organized against Gallegos-Diaz\u2019s suspension, demanding transparency from campus.<\/p>\n
More than 2,300 people signed a \u201cThrive 4 Lupe\u201d petition calling for transparency about her suspension from campus.<\/p>\n
Enr\u00edquez also worked with the ASUC to pass a resolution condemning campus\u2019s decision to place Gallegos-Diaz on administrative leave.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just feel that the university has to be much more transparent when they do something like this, because Lupe is an invaluable part of the campus community,\u201d said Harvey Dong, a continuing UC Berkeley lecturer in Asian American studies. \u201cWe all want to know what\u2019s going on and what\u2019s happening. I talk to other professors, and they all say that they feel that she\u2019s being unjustly mistreated.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Adrian Garcia, Co-Executive Lead of Brown Issues at UC Berkeley, CLSD has not been able to get in touch with Gallegos-Diaz since her suspension.<\/p>\n
Last week, the California Latino Legislative Caucus wrote a letter to Chancellor Rich Lyons demanding Gallegos-Diaz\u2019s reinstatement. When asked questions pertaining to the letter, campus spokespeople referred The Daily Californian to a previous statement that states they cannot comment on personnel matters.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are doing the best we can, but we really need Lupe back because Lupe is the coraz\u00f3n, the beating heart of all of these initiatives,\u201d Meza said. \u201cIt\u2019s like, well, what\u2019s our North Star now? \u2026 It honestly feels like we\u2019ve been backstabbed by a division that has told us they want to be a Latinx thriving institution.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To Ph.D. student Alexis Meza, Lupe Gallegos-Diaz \u2014 who directed the Chicanx Latinx Student Development office \u2014 was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":466448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[183367,183357,89853,26927,183364,183361,183359,53778,183360,4729,183365,125172,183358,143,145,144,52369,183362,183363,183366],"class_list":["post-466447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-adrian-garcia","tag-alexis-meza","tag-asian-american-studies","tag-asuc","tag-california-latino-legislative-caucus","tag-casa-magdalena-mora","tag-chicanx-latinx-student-development-office","tag-decal","tag-emma-enrquez","tag-ethnic-studies","tag-harvey-dong","tag-lorena-oropeza","tag-lupe-gallegos-diaz","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-rich-lyons","tag-sharing-wisdoms-across-generations-event","tag-thrive-4-lupe","tag-uc-berkeley-brown-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}