On November 7, Felix M. Padilla will deliver this year's Schomburg-Moreno Lecture.

Felix M. Padilla, visiting professor of American studies at Yale University and a leading national authority in the fields of Latino politics and education, will deliver the annual Schomburg-Moreno Lecture Thursday, November 9, in Mary Woolley Hall's New York Room from 4 to 6 pm. His talk is titled “Cultural Literacy for Children: Implications for Educators, Parents, College Students, and Other Mentors.”

Padilla has published widely in the fields of Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and Cuban American relations, the sociology of Latino culture, identity, and music, and Latino/a youth gangs. He is the founder and editor of the Latino Studies Journal, a multidisciplinary publication devoted to the study of contemporary and historic Latino/a life in United States society.

At the age of thirteen, Padilla moved from Puerto Rico to Chicago, where he received his higher education, culminating in a Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University in 1982. He is the author of five major books on the Latino/a experience in the United States: Latino Ethnic Consciousness (1985); Puerto Rican Chicago (1987); The Gang as an American Enterprise (1992); Outside the Wall: The Struggle of a Puerto Rican Prisoner's Wife (1993); and The Struggle of Latino/Latina University Students in Search of a Liberating Education (1997), which won the 1998 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award of the American Sociological Association for best exemplifying scholarship geared toward antiracism and social justice in American society.

The Struggle of Latino/Latina University Students is a compilation of stories written by students over three semesters in Padilla's sociology of Latino/a culture and identity class. This process of self-rediscovery is at the center of his classroom work in all of his topical offerings. Padilla is also the founder and owner of Libros, Encouraging Cultural Literacy, a publisher of Latino/a multicultural literature for children and young readers. This year, Libros published its first two children's books, Mis Dos Luces (My Two Lights) and Cuentitos de Mami Amor (Mami Amor's Little Stories).

The Schomburg-Moreno lecture, begun by the College's Latin American studies program in 1995, features a distinguished speaker in Latin American, Caribbean, or Latino/a studies. The series is named in honor of two Latin Americans whose lives developed at the intersections of all three communities and whose contributions to these communities, and to the larger United States society, are far too often ignored.

Arthur Alfonso Schomburg came to this country from Puerto Rico in 1891 and is best known as the curator of the New York Public Library, a founder of the American Negro Academy in 1911, and founder of the Harlem-based Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Luisa Moreno was born in Guatemala and emigrated to the United States from Mexico in 1928. A lifelong labor organizer and activist, she was cofounder of the Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples in New Mexico in 1938 and later served as vice president of the California CIO and the cannery workers' union.