LUNCH AND LEARN AND EVENING SPEAKER SERIES
Explore Houston’s History with a historical expert while enjoying your brown bag or ordered lunch from Tres Market Foods. This series of speakers is generously underwritten in part by The Summerlee Foundation.
October 16, 2025: Christean Kapp with Saengerbund.org - German Americans, German Texans, & GermanTown Houston
November 20, 2025: Family History Research Center, Clayton Library presents “Finding Your Roots”
1100 Bagby Street, Museum Gallery. Free Parking at 212 Dallas
Members attend Lunch and Learns for free! Lunches from Tres Market Foods are additional. Membership information here- https://www.heritagesociety.org/membership-join
If you can’t attend in person, purchase a YouTube video of the program for $5 HERE. You will receive an email with the program the night of the program.
SEPTEMBER
Amid the youth-led movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Brown and Black students at the University of Houston fought to establish places that would critically shape research, learning, and student activism: the Center for Mexican American Studies and African American Studies. In this talk, Dr. Samantha M. Rodriguez will discuss how both gender and race liberation was central to the struggle to create ethnic studies hubs in Houston, and the relevancy of these fights today.
The Heritage Society will host guest speaker Dr. Samantha Rodriguez at a Lunch and Learn event on Thursday, September 18, 2025, at noon at the Albert & Ethel Herzstein Museum Gallery at 1100 Bagby Street in Houston. Rodriguez, History and Humanities Professor with Houston Community College, will give a lecture in demand titled “Brown and Black Place-Making: Forging Race and Gender Power in Houston” in observance of Hispanic Heritage Month.
She’s credited with co-authoring the award-winning book, Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas, and served as a research assistant, oral historian and interview processor for the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Among Dr. Rodriguez’s credits, she was a Fellow for the 2022 NEH Summer Institute, “Towards a People’s History of Landscape–Part 1: Black and Indigenous Histories of the Nation’s Capital,” as well as a Fellow for the 2023 Mellon Foundation Ethnic Studies Educators’ Academy. Currently, she is working on a monograph that leverages oral histories to examine the ways Tejanas in Austin, Houston and San Antonio balanced a commitment to gender liberation and ethnic self-determination within the broader nexus of the Chicana/Chicano Movement, the Black Power Movement and the mainstream Anglo Feminist Movement.
Additionally, her research has been featured in The University of Texas Press anthologies ¡Chicana Movidas!: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movimiento Era !(2018) and Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas (2021).
Speaker’s Biography
Samantha M. Rodriguez, Ph.D. is a history professor at Houston Community College. She graduated the Department of History at the University of Houston. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in History from the same institution. Rodriguez's dissertation, "Carving Spaces for Feminism and Nationalism: Tejana Activism in the Matrix of Social Unrest, 1967-1978," relies heavily on oral histories to investigate the ways Tejana community feminists in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio straddled a commitment to gender equity and ethnic self-determination within the broader nexus of the Chicana/o Movement, the Black Power Movement, and the Women's Liberation Movement. Underscoring the linkages among race and gender liberation struggles, this project shows how Tejanas fought for ethnic women's leadership, reproductive rights, public health, educational and occupational equality, welfare rights, and an end to state-sanctioned violence in the Jim Crow South.
PAST EVENTS
Thursday, January 16, 2025: Andrew “Dru” Sanders, "Texas in the International Civil War"
February 20, 2025: Dr. Caleb McDaniel Black History Month: “Captain’s Story: Slavery and Freedom in the Archives of The Heritage Society and Rice University”
March 20, 2025: Dr. Karen Kossie-Chernyshev, Professor of History atTSU and Founding Director, SWATH “Women’s History Month: Black Women’s Empowerment through Education”
April 17, 2025: Suzanne Simpson, "Wild Houston: A Natural History of the City”
May 15, 2025: Author Dr. Jeremy Pedigo for “The Life and Politics of United States Senator Sam Houston”.
May 16, 2025: Samuel Collins, The Birthplace of Juneteenth (Evening event, wine & cheese reception)
June 20, 2025: Bryanna Jenkins, LGBTQIA History Month (Evening event, wine & cheese reception) Click HERE for Programs for Adults
July 9, 2025: America250 Speaker and Wine Reception John Espinosa “Spain’s Contributions to the American Revolution” - Wednesday, July 9, 6:00 - 8:00 PM
August 21, 2025: The History of Mah Jongg by Linda Freedman Block
