Felicia Montes on Día de los Muertos, art in motion and teaching at CSULB
During this year’s celebrations of Latine Heritage Month, faculty member Felicia Montes shared her passion for art and culture beyond the classroom, helping students to develop a new Día de los Muertos installation at Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum.
The new display is an ofrenda, an altar celebrants traditionally display to honor departed loved ones, centered on the figure of a skeletal woman and a wreath of flores de papel in blazing orange, both rising above collected photographs, candles, paper skulls and other art. Montes, an assistant professor of Chicano and Latino Studies, is also helping to coordinate a Oct. 28 Día de los Muertos celebration at Anatol Center, to feature additional student-made ofrendas. Montes teaches courses in ethnic studies and Chicanx tradition in Mexican and Southwestern art, engaging students where academics intersect with reality.
Q: How are you hoping the campus will participate in Día de los Muertos celebrations?
Felicia Montes: We’re planning a very inclusive Day of the Dead, or ancestor celebration event. What I’ve found through my classes is that not everybody has information about it, or if they do, it’s usually from a movie. Or, some people connect to it and have been celebrating for so long. This celebration is to honor all the different experiences and create an open space for people to come and gather in community on campus.
Q: You teach a course on heritage art in Mexico and the Southwest. How do you want students to be inspired?
FM: That class is beautiful for me. I can bring all my knowledge to share with students. Academically, finding articles and books that really speak about the history of Chicanx and Latinx arts, music, performance and dance. Part of the learning outcome is to create. Aztec dancers spoke about history, but we also learned and moved. We brought Puerto Rican bomba music, now more known about because of the popularity of plena and bomba, Bad Bunny, and how he’s infused that into a new genre of music. We had others, including corridos and silkscreen art.
Even if people weren’t artists, musicians or dancers, they really spoke about the importance of being able to have different types of learning and embodied knowledge.
Q: Who are some of your favorite Latine artists? Which movements have influenced you?
FM: The Chicanx/Latinx art movement is based in social justice from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Practicing artists who have moved from the mural movement into galleries and museums and are now being recognized, as they should, have really influenced me in a big way.
Chicana feminist artists, people like my mentor/femtor, who I took classes with at Cal State Northridge in my master’s program, is Yreina Cervantez. Others like Celia Herrera Rodriguez, Ester Hernandez — all of them bring oftentimes a traditional art form but also new genres and speak about their experiences connected to historical and sociopolitical events.
When I share my experiences as a young person or in college, learning about them or seeing a poem that reflected my own experience and how it opened my own eyes and academic brain, I think that connects with students because they’re going through that same process.
Q: What has teaching about Latine and ethnic studies taught you about people’s awareness of cultures and communities?
FM: I think it’s important to be able to speak with people about their own experiences; what people are taught in K-12, what’s the mainstream narrative. We speak about counternarratives. What type of history, information or literature they were exposed to prior to these classes, and what they’re interested in learning. For ethnic studies, I believe for many it’s an opening of genres. It opens the mind to new literature, new history.
Q: You co-founded Mujeres de Maíz, which supports Latine and indigenous women. Your work with this nonprofit has paralleled your academic career. How have those experiences informed your teaching?
FM: As a student at UCLA, I co-founded Mujeres de Maíz, or Women of the Corn. Its mission is to improve women’s overall and mental health by creating empowering community spaces. We focus on holistic wellness, health education, cultural arts, arts exhibitions and publishing. It was always important to bring academic knowledge and see how it can be accessible to the community.
Students here relate to being able to speak about not only current events but their own personal experiences. Learning about the walkouts of the 1960s in East L.A., looking for better education and eventually, looking to have Chicano studies departments. We talk about how now there is a Chicanx/Latinx studies department. Maybe they’re taking the class for the very first time, and maybe it’s just for a requirement, but what does that mean?
One of the class projects is an educational journey timeline. Did they have programs that helped them go to college? That’s related to one of the student-learning outcomes about resistance movements, specifically the Chicanx/Latinx walkouts of 1968. One question is, “How can you relate it to current events, other than your personal experience?”
Note: Montes co-edited “Mujeres de Maíz en Movimiento” a 2024 book covering the history of Mujeres de Maíz. The work is a finalist in three 2025 International Latino Book Awards categories.
