Conference Artwork

SACNAS is proud to have partnered with artist Cecelia Perez for the 2026 SACNAS Annual Conference. Cecilia designed a deeply meaningful piece that will be featured in Long Beach, CA. 

Cecelia Perez | Artist, Designer
Cecelia Perez's Instagram

Mural Statement

This mural piece brings together Chicano history, science, and paying homage to indigenous communities as they exist in Southern California.

At the foreground is a young brown girl with long hair wearing a brown beret, sitting and reading. As she reads, numerous pages fly away from the book and transform into monarch butterflies flying toward a glowing sunset sky full of stars. The monarch butterfly is an analogic symbol within the Chicano experience because monarchs migrate across borders, survive against the odds, and always find their way. The act of reading and releasing knowledge into the world is intentional. Education and access to knowledge have always been central to both the Chicano civil rights movement and Indigenous cultural preservation.

The brown beret on her head references the Brown Berets, the Chicano civil rights organization that rose in the late 1960s as a symbol of community defense, cultural pride, and resistance. One cloud to the left in the sky forms the shape of the Chicano Power fist, connecting that history of resistance directly to the landscape these communities have always occupied.

The vegetation and rolling hills depicted in the artwork serve as a representation of the Southern California landscape. A large city skyline sits against the mountain range with palm trees. The sunset sky holds visible stars and a moon shown across its full cycle. Lunar cycles have guided the Gabrieleño/Tongva people, the original stewards of this land, for thousands of years in agriculture, ceremony, and navigation. In Aztec cosmology, the sun was central to all life, governing agriculture, human existence, and the cyclical nature of the world.

The plants throughout this piece reflect the deep ecological knowledge of the Gabrieleño/Tongva people. Nopales, tunas, aloe, native berries, pine nuts, and pine cones were all central to their diet and survival. The handwoven baskets filled with those same traditional foods represent the sophistication of Tongva material culture and their generations of understanding of this land's resources.

The lowrider Impala with hydraulics connects Chicano cultural identity to STEM. Lowrider culture was born out of the Chicano community during the postwar years as a statement of identity. The engineering, physics, and craftsmanship that go into building a lowrider are a direct example of scientific thinking. Framing the piece along the bottom are California poppies and Matilija poppy, often called the "fried-egg plant", native wildflowers that have bloomed across Tongva territory for thousands of years.

Every element in this piece is in conversation with the others. Indigenous land knowledge and Chicano cultural pride share the same roots in Southern California. This mural reflects that these communities, their science, their art, and their history are continuous.