Academic mestizaje: Embracing Hispanicity in the humanities at Hispanic Serving Institutions

Abstract

Through a combination of large-scale data analysis and analysis of culturally responsive ways of embracing Latino students, we provide insight on the work of three Hispanic Serving Institutions in the humanities.

KEYWORDS:

• Hispanic
• humanities
• pedagogy

Notes

¹ We purposefully use “Hispanic” throughout this article to call attention to the federal nomenclature of “Hispanic Serving Institutions.” The increasing use of Latinx as a way of indexing gender-inclusive nomenclatures is also a critical project. However, Latinx itself is also insufficient (see Garcia, 2017a), and we thus align this article to the federal designation not as a way of affirming its use, but as a strategy to underscore its current circulation.

² Please note that though HSIs only became an official federal designation in 1992, there were three Hispanic Serving Institutions that were established in the 1970s with the express purpose of educating Latinxs. These are Hostos Community College, Boricua College, and the now closed National Hispanic University.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [Hispanic Serving Institutions: Pathways to the Professoriate].