Healing Through Story and Place in Pueblo
Aztlán is more than just a word. Its meaning runs deep, branching through the roots of shared space and humanity. It is a homeland, an identity, a cultural inheritance. It is a symbol of resistance and a reclamation of power. But on Tuesday morning, inside the ballroom at CSU Pueblo, it became something else entirely. It became irrevocably Pueblo.
More than 200 people gathered for the Aztlán Research Center’s Summer Institute, a day devoted not just to storytelling, but to the kind that stitches people and place together. This year’s theme, Aztlán Futures: Generational Healing through Art and Storytelling, marked not just a conference, but a gathering. A space where people came to listen and to ask hard questions about who we are and how stories heal us.
From the beginning, it was clear this was more than an academic event. The opening keynote came from Tony Garcia, executive artistic director of Denver’s Su Teatro, who arrived on stage with jokes and a musician’s timing. Garcia moved seamlessly from laughter into the pain that often lies beneath it. He showed how theatre confronts erasure, survival, and displacement by offering them a space to be healed.
Matthew Garcia, co-founder of DesertArtLAB and a faculty member at CSU Pueblo, brought the story even closer to the ground. He spoke of roots. Of soil. Of cactus. And how storytelling can take the shape of ecological practice. He pointed to DesertArtLAB’s installation near Dutch Clark Stadium, where rows of Cholla cactus are thriving. “People hate it,” he said, “but it’s the one thing we need.”
If you’re from Pueblo, you know the native cactus: spiny, stubborn, and hard to love. But its presence helps restore. Cholla is a symbol of Pueblo. It reminds us of who we are, and that despite what we might appear to be from the outside, we are necessary and carry with us the heart of the future. For Garcia, this is Aztlán in practice.
The day rounded out with two other scholars: Dylan AT Miner and Ramona Beltrán. Miner, a Chicano artist and professor from Michigan, spoke about how visual culture serves as a site of Indigenous resistance and connection. Beltrán, a professor, storyteller, and scholar, shared her project Our Stories, Our Medicine Archive (OSOMA), which draws on Indigenous health knowledge to address disease, heal trauma, and confront discrimination.The Aztlán Research Center has hosted these Summer Institutes for several years now, each with a new theme. But its mission remains constant: to connect. This year, the Institute asked a simple question—what happens when we tell our stories out loud, in public, and with each other?
What emerged in that ballroom was an understanding of how storytelling frees us from the people and institutions that do not stand for us. It untethers us from the rules of respectability and performance, telling us to speak honestly. It roots us in the kind of pride that does not need permission.
It also reminds us that to be from Pueblo is not a footnote. It is not something to explain or qualify. It is its own kind of power.
Aztlán, that day, felt like something that has always been here. Just beneath the surface, and right next to that pesky Cholla cactus you keep trying to get rid of, only to find it growing back, stronger than before.
