Got Cultural Citizenship? A Place-Based and Socio-Historical Analysis of Postsecondary Students’ Cultural Logics and Values at a Land Grant Institution in Southern New Mexico

ABSTRACT

Using data from a 2013 Student Diversity Survey, this place-based analysis examines the cultural values, beliefs, and logics of postsecondary students from an Hispanic Land Grant Institution in southern New Mexico. The analysis explores the diverse social profiles of the students in the sample and how race, gender, and class statuses shape student’s cultural logics related to educational democracy. Relying on the concepts of cultural citizenship and settler colonialism, the author imagines a post-assimilationist education trajectory that celebrates the cultural wealth of working-class, students of color, and women students as they diversify US higher education. The findings show that these postsecondary students embrace cultural logics centering on interdependence and collectivism and reject cultural logics centering on individualism and independence. The author makes a case for expanding neoliberal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion approaches in US higher education to grapple with the foundational violences of Indigenous land dispossession and ongoing settler colonialism that maintains systemic inequities and exclusions in US public education.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversity
• Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
• cultural citizenship
• settler colonialism
• land grant institutions
• Indigenous land dispossession
• US higher education
• educational democracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ I use quotation marks around the term “white” to remind readers of the political construction of whiteness that is central to the racial project of white supremacy and colonialism on Turtle Island (Omi & Winant, 1994).

² I acknowledge and thank my NMSU colleagues (Lisa Bond-Maupin, Hwiman Chung, Michele Nishiguchi, Hilda Olivas, Don Pepion, William Quintana, and Joe Song) who also served on the Diversity Committee and contributed to this Student Diversity Survey. All ideas and errors in this manuscript are my own and do not reflect the positions or ideas of any other committee member or administrator at NMSU.

³ I use the term Latina/o to broadly referring to students identifying as Hispanic, Mexican American, and/or Chicana/o.

⁴ The classification of Minority Serving Institutions includes Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, Asian Serving Institutions, Tribal Colleges and Universities and Other mixed-minority serving institutions (Li Xiaojie, 2007).

⁵ See the University of Michigan Student Survey and the CIRP Freshman Survey developed at the University of California, Los Angeles.