AfroMundo Festival: “Fight for Equality”
Sunday, April 12, 2026
3:00 pm
NHCC | Wells Fargo Auditorium
2026 AfroMundo Festival: “Futurism: Manifesting the Envisioned”
Featured Regions: U.S. & U.S. Territories: Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, Mariana Islands
Panel Discussion with Darlene T. Gomez, attorney for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives; Abraham Paulos of BAJI (Black Alliance for Just Immigration); Dr. Estévan Rael-Gálvez, President and founder of Native Bound-Unbound; and Azadeh Shahshahani, Legal and Advocacy for Project South. Moderated by Dr. Belinda Deneen Wallace, Director of UNM’s Liberal Arts and Integrative Studies Program.
The 2026 AfroMundo Festival is free to the general public with limited seating and includes films, concerts, literature, oral traditions, panel discussions, culinary and other arts to foster a greater understanding of our shared humanity.
PLEASE MAKE YOUR RESERVATION HERE!
Panel discussion with:
Darlene T. Gomez is a lifelong native of Northern New Mexico, having been born and raised in Lumberton where her ancestors homesteaded before New Mexico was incorporated into the United States. She has been practicing law for over 19 years and specializes in Indian Law, Complex Family Law, and advocating on behalf of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Relatives (MMIWR). Darlene attended the University of New Mexico School of Law where she first began her pro bono work fighting for clean water in her hometown of Lumberton. She was the inaugural recipient of the Carlos Vigil Scholarship, among numerous other awards while in school. Darlene is tirelessly passionate about giving a voice to the voiceless through her pro bono work. She has been a fierce advocate for primary and secondary victims of the MMIWR crisis since 2001 and spends much of her time organizing rallies, mentoring and advocating for secondary victims, preparing and distributing press releases, and serving as the attorney for 15 families of MMIWR victims. She is a founding member of the New Mexico MMIW Task Force and serves as the general counsel for the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization Medicine Wheel Ride. She is widely considered a leading expert in MMIWR throughout the US and her persistent efforts on behalf of victims have led to an increase in domestic as well as international media attention for the MMIWR Public Health Crisis
https://dargomezlaw.com/mmiw/
Abraham Paulos is a nationally recognized communications strategist, writer, and advocate who has spent over two decades driving the movement for human rights and immigrant justice. His work centrally focuses on the complex intersection of immigration, race, and criminalization, with a specific emphasis on the unique challenges faced by Black migrants. Abraham currently serves as the Deputy Director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). His career features influential leadership roles, including serving as the Executive Director of Families for Freedom. He has also been a researcher for Human Rights First and a Program Director for Life of Hope, a community-based organization serving low-income immigrants. A powerful voice in public discourse, Abraham has highlighted systemic issues within the U.S. deportation system through his writing for outlets like Foreign Policy Association, Huffington Post, and City Limits. He has also been featured on major news platforms such as NY Daily News, Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Vice, ABC News and NBC News. Abraham is a Stateless Eritrean refugee born in Sudan and raised in Chicago. He holds an associate’s degree from Harold Washington College, a bachelor’s degree from George Washington University and a master’s degree from The New School.
https://baji.org
Dr. Estevan Rael-Gálvez is the President and founder of Native Bond-Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Slavery. He was born and raised in the sovereign landscape of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, where the memories and stories of the complex identities that formed these communities were part of his upbringing on the family ranch, including of “la India Panana,” the Pawnee woman whose story continues to be told by descendants. Trained as an anthropologist, historian, and ethnographer, he received his BA from UC Berkeley and his MA and PhD from the University of Michigan, where he completed an award-winning dissertation on Indigenous slavery in colonial New Mexico. He has served as New Mexico State Historian, Executive Director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, and Senior Vice President at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. His work is rooted in lived experience—holding a woven Diné blanket passed down as inheritance and protection or discovering archival traces of several Indigenous people in his family tree, including Antonia, listed simply as “India” in the 1750 Santa Fe census, and Margarita, an Apache woman named in a lawsuit over her possession.
https://nativeboundunbound.org/home/
Azadeh Shahshahani, Legal and Advocacy Director with Project South, advances a practice of movement lawyering, focused on confronting state repression and dismantling systems of surveillance, incarceration, and deportation. Azadeh has organized for two decades to protect and defend migrants and Black and Muslim communities from systemic lslamophobia, xenophobia, and anti-Black racism. She also provides support to social justice movements in the Global South, from Brazil to Palestine.
Azadeh is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She currently serves on the Advisory Council of the American Association of Jurists. She is the author or editor of several groundbreaking human rights reports as well as law review articles and book chapters focused on movement lawyering, immigrants’ rights, surveillance of Muslim-Americans, and using the international human rights framework as a tool for liberation. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, MSNBC, TIME Magazine, Boston Review, Slate, and Los Angeles Times, among others.
MODERATOR: Dr. Belinda Deneen Wallace, Dr. Belinda Deneen Wallace (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Director of the Liberal Arts and Integrative Studies Program at the University of New Mexico. She teaches classes and conducts research on Global Black Speculative Fiction, with an emphasis on Afrofuturism and Caribbean speculative literature. Her essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Small Axe, Cultural Dynamix, and Radical Teacher and in several anthologies, including the forthcoming book, The Routledge Handbook of Latinx Visions, where she contributed a chapter that explores the intersections between Caribbean-speculative fiction and Latinx-futurism. Presently, she is editing a book on power, gender, and teaching speculative fiction in the college classroom. Belinda’s edited collection will be published in early 2027