YaYa Porras reading at the Berkeley Poetry Festival in 1999. The event was held the first weekend of October at the University Art Museum and Sculpture Garden.
J. Andrea Porras / yAyA is a Queer, 2Spirit, Coahuiltecan descendant Chicana, madre of JAH’Sol Amaru, cultura cura curator, producer, intersectional artist, practitioner; with over 25 years experience in performance, organizing, facilitation, grant making, grant reviewing, philanthropy, and mentoring. Porras began their performative journey as a roller skating waiter edutaining and serving up Tex-Mex campo to mesa cuisine at her family’s local Bordertown haven/ restaurant. Amezcua’s was located in their beloved barrio and birthplace of San Felipe, Del Rio Tejas.
They have been offering intersectional multimedia arte between edutainment and story sharing, storytelling ceremonias through solo and collaborations for over 25 years.. Porras brings viewers into the past, present, and future via Charcoal Foot Travels spoken palabra and improvs, teatro y movimiento as relative and guest upon Sacred Indigenous Lands 4 decades and counting. They are self and community-funded and an honored culture bearers via commissions, grants, invitations, research, and opportunities. Porras también curates visual exhibitions, creates site specific installations, ritual performance, teatro y flor y canto movimiento. Most recently Current Classy Broadway Curatorial Resident in Oak Park, Sacramento.
Porras earned their B.A. from California State University Sacramento, Theater Dance, and Cultural Anthropology Departments, where they specialized in Black, Indigenous, and Chicano/Theater. They focused on acting, improv movement, playwriting, producing, and video documenting. Porras dedicated their early years at CSUS to recruiting hundreds of first-generation students from Sacramento high schools. They were recruited by the Education Opportunity Program as a student teachers/peer mentor in Ethnic Studies, Acting, Chicano Theater, Cultural Anthropology, and African-Caribbean dance. Simultaneously, Porras spent years as an artist in residence at elementary and middle schools in Sacramento, funded by The Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. They studied, taught, performed, and participated in Inter-Tribal ceremonies as Caribbean Danza Mexika traditional dancers predominantly connecting and building in Northern California across the Southwest and later in Cuba, Mexico, Africa, and NY.
They crossed over from teaching artists and community cultural producers to Arts administrators and philanthropy focus in joining the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. They served as the city's Arts Education coordinator and later Co-founded, Directed, and Facilitated a Roots, Altars, and Movement course at World Arts Space. The WAS project brought together 8 artists for 8 weeks, 8 hours a day, offering free and accessible Arte y Cultura. An intergenerational community Artist and apprentice residency/ building relations with 100 emerging youth artists through an all-immersive arts training safe space embedded in the community of Oak Park in the Summers of 2004/ 05.
Porras also served as a community development organizer with Mutual Housing of California. In their 4 year term, they created civic leadership engagement and arts and cultural revival pop-up workshops in multiple incredibly diverse and intergenerational family-subsidized housing communities they served throughout the Sacramento region. Later came the call to action as manager, community, and art gallery curator at Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanacer, founded by Malaquias Montoya and Carlos Jackson and directed by Maceo Montoya. TANA is based in the rural community of Woodland, CA. Mentored by Malaquias, and leading an amazing and talented mentee /student/ artist staff, they collectively recruited and grew new generations of political poster makers on the satellite location for the University of California at Davis Chicana/o Studies Department.
Porras recently exited their 5-year role as Arts Grant Specialist for the California Arts Council, where they managed a portfolio totaling approximately $9 million in funding per year. Currently, they stand for love, dignity, and transformation as an agent for BIPOC communities as a member of the Caltrans Office of Race and Equity, Native American Liaison Branch Headquarters. They are a 2004 NALAC Leadership Institute graduate and an invited peer for the 2017 Advocacy Leader Institute. They are currently attending IAIA as a student in the Native American Art History certificate program. Porras, co-founded Movimiento Molcajete (1997) Contemporary Indigenous Teatro Co. & MA Series Arts (2018), a 501c3 non-profit MA Series Arts nonprofit 2018: dedicated to supporting performance, research & practice by women y queers of color, honoring the full spectrum of cultural and gender identities.
Berkeley Poetry Festival
Since 1998, the Berkeley Poetry Festival has honored activist writers by creating space for performance and presenting a lifetime achievement award. In 2013, Sharon Coleman and I, MK Chavez, took over organizing the festival. We dedicated ourselves to building an equitable event by uplifting the voices of BIPOC, LGBTQI+, and other writers who experience systemic violence and oppression.
It was with great heartache that we read the bold public letter written by two anonymous sexual assault survivors who are calling for accountability and healing from transgressions committed by former lifetime achievement award recipient Rafael Jesús González. You can read their letter here:
In 2015, we honored Rafael Jesús González because of the key role that he has played in our community as a leader and mentor. The Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Award is not an award that can be retracted because it is an acknowledgment and an event that has already occurred. However, we are extremely hopeful that because of his background, Rafael Jesús González will step up as he has against other injustices and violence in the community and the world and do the work that must be done.
We know our community is hurt and in need of healing, and we are committed to supporting a process that honors the survivors in whatever way we can. Berkeley Poetry Festival celebrates the survivors' work and words and acknowledges that the burden should not be on survivors to do this necessary work.
To support the requests, we commit to:
• We will remove the celebration and centering of Rafael Jesùs Gonzalez from Berkeley Poetry Festival social media and future promotional materials, including the list of past lifetime achievement award recipients, to hold space for the healing work that is ahead (no later than Monday, August 21, 2022)
• Rafael Jesùs Gonzalez will not be included in future Berkeley Poetry Festival events.
Berkeley Poetry Festival also acknowledges the work of LA DASS , which makes the invisible visible while holding values that seek to humanize and heal.
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