Professor Zimmerman’s UC San Diego presentation will trace the story of Chicago Latino art and literature from the city’s “Latino cultural explosion” of the 1970s and on to new generations responding to crises in Latin America and involving questions of discrimination, gentrification, displacement and struggle. He will examine Chicago Latino art as examples of regional diasporic and transnational processes important to understanding recent Latino cultural transformations. Issues of national, gender, ethnic and spatial identifications will be featured as Zimmerman reviews the materials appearing on his LACASA Chicago website (www.lacasachicago.org), and previews the wider range of interviews and supporting materials he has recently donated to the Smithsonian Institution. Marc Zimmerman is Professor Emeritus in Latin American and Latino Studies at the U. of Illinois Chicago, and in World and Hispanic Culture and Literature at the U. of Houston. He earned his Comparative Literature Ph.D. at UC San Diego. He has lived most of his life working in Latino community and university programs throughout the Midwest, and teaching mainly Latino students, while directing the LACASA Chicago Publications series on Latin American and Latino cultural studies. He has written and edited some twenty-five academic books, plus four volumes of “memoir fiction.” His Latino-centered books are U.S. Latino Literature (1992) and his award-winning Defending Their Own in the Cold: The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans (2011). His edited collections include works on Latin American-U.S. transnational processes, on Latinos in U.S. cities, and four books on Chicago Mexican art—above all, Bringing Aztlán to Mexican Chicago (2010). His Latino- themed “memoir fictions” include one text on Latino Chicago and another on the San Diego/ Tijuana area (2017).