There was singing before the first session began. And dancing. And a room full of women — students, faculty, Classified Professionals, and guests — finding each other in the noise of a morning not yet fully awake, exchanging names, sharing where they were from, learning how to call each other back together.
That was by design.
San José City College hosted its annual Womyn of Color Summit on Friday, March 27, drawing students and community members to a full day of keynote programming, breakout workshops, and shared meals centered on a single, expansive theme: the power of women of color to claim their voices, honor their roots, and reimagine their futures.
The event ran from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and was emceed by Donntay Moore-Thomas and Xiomara Martinez, with opening remarks from Chancellor Beatriz Chaidez and SJCC President Dr. Marilyn Flores before the morning’s keynote address.
“I Go. I May.”
The keynote was delivered by Dr. Reelaviolette Botts-Ward, who wasted no time making the room her own. Before she said a word about her own story, she taught the audience one of her favorite cultural practices — her round, a tradition from the African American community that, she explained, literally translates to “let’s pull together.”
The call-and-response practice uses the phrases I go — meaning, “do I have your attention?” and I may, meaning yes. She had the room standing, moving, singing a freedom song called “Freedom Time” in rounds of call-and-response, hands clapping, bodies swaying. The energy shifted almost immediately from a conference crowd into something closer to a community.
“I always like to start with a little singing and dancing,” Dr. Botts-Ward said, “because it’s a part of our culture, and it’s a part of how we celebrate who we are.”
What followed was a keynote that was equal parts personal testimony and collective reckoning. Dr. Botts-Ward told a generational story, her family’s story, beginning with the forced migration of her ancestors from West Africa to South Carolina during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, through her great-grandparents’ Great Migration north to Detroit in the 1920s, and into the lives of the women who came after them.
She described women who were gifted artists, poets, singers, and dancers forced into silence and smallness by domestic violence and the wider violence of white supremacy. Women who lost their songs, their cultural practices, their sense of home. Women whose losses, she said, broke her heart when she first learned of them as a teenager.
“The women I come from must have been powerful,” she told the audience. “Because I knew, as a teenage girl, that I was powerful. I had songs in my throat that needed to be known, and I had gifts in my soul that needed to be witnessed.”
Her keynote threaded grief and joy together with intention, using the freedom songs not as performance, but as proof that something survives, and as a reminder that when the load gets heavy, you can always sing and dance to lighten it.
A Day Built for Women of Color, By Women of Color
Following the keynote, attendees spread across campus for two rounds of breakout sessions, with nine concurrent workshops led by women facilitators covering topics such as identity, confidence, and self-determination.
Session offerings included Exploring Intersectionality with Mer Curry Nunez, Embrace Your Roots to Find Your Voice with Gale Daikou, Authentically You with Elisse Reyna, and Seeing Me, Becoming Me: A Vision Board for My Future with Yesenia Escobar Mendoza. Yvonne Phan led a session on public speaking and networking, while Julinda LeDee’s You Belong Here: Owning Your Story, Voice, and Impact and Angel Nicole’s self-defense workshop rounded out the afternoon programming. Chynna Obana facilitated Women in STEM, and Gemma Chavez Garcia closed out both sessions with Own Your Future.
A resource fair and lunch at The SPOT gave participants space to connect between breakout rounds before the afternoon closed with remarks and a raffle.
The Womyn of Color Summit is organized annually by SJCC’s WOC Committee. This year’s event continued what has become a meaningful tradition on campus — not just a conference, but a gathering. Dr. Botts-Ward opened the morning by asking the room, I go — do I have your attention? By the end of the day, the answer from everyone in attendance seemed to be a clear “I may”: a space where women of color are not asked to make themselves smaller, but are invited, loudly and joyfully, to take up exactly as much room as they need.
