Serving Students of Color at Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Beyond
Photo of the 2019-2020 Latinx Student Alliance at the 2019 Hispanic Heritage Month Closing Event with honoree alumna Peggy Robles Alvarado. The Executive Board was Ariel Vargas, President; Rebecca Perez, Vice President; Miqueas Molano, Secretary; Lily Hooks, Treasurer.
In November 2019, members of the Latinx Student Alliance at Lehman College, a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and majority-minority school located in the Bronx, NY, presented a letter to the chair of the English department addressing the lack of diversity in the curriculum and demanding change. This letter, signed by hundreds of students within and outside the department initially led to a meeting with the college president and subsequently, to a promise from the English department to revise its British-centric curriculum. When finally put to a vote by the English faculty, the student-inspired proposal to center Latinx and African American Literature courses overwhelmingly passed.
This series of events demonstrates the power of culturally responsive student-led anti-racist initiatives to transform outdated curricula. It suggests, furthermore, not only the special responsibility that Hispanic-serving and majority-minority institutions have to their students but also the special role they could play in spearheading academic innovation across universities and colleges in the U.S.—and, indeed, beyond.
Prior to the Latinx Student Alliance letter, there had been little movement on an English curriculum that was, for all intents and purposes, a contemporary version of colonial education. Lehman’s student body is more than 50% Latinx, more than 30% African American, and less than 7% white. Nevertheless, the most recent English curriculum overhaul (2010) created a core requiring a three-part British literature survey sequence, alongside two other core classes largely focused on white authors and an additional Shakespeare requirement, while ghettoizing U.S. minority and postcolonial literatures in their own ‘elective’ block, where they were forced to compete against each other.
In their letter to the English Department, the students identified the problem with this curriculum. They wrote:
There is a great desire and necessity across Lehman College's student body to see themselves in their classes, to see themselves as possible authors of their own texts, experts in their own fields […] People of color should not be sidelined as a simple option to learn about. Nor should minority groups that make up the undergrad student body of CUNY Lehman College be pitted against each other to be able to learn about one another. Ideally, the texts used in the courses should at least mirror the student body of Lehman College, if not the broader world.
These students did more than ask for “curriculum reform.” They demanded that the faculty and administration fundamentally rethink the very role of the curriculum at their college. Rather than adding a pinch of diversity to the curriculum, they wanted to dismantle its white supremacist structure altogether. They wanted a curriculum that respected them as agents of knowledge themselves—that could, in other words, see them as the future of the field.
In her expansive work on HSIs, Gina Ann Garcia has emphasized that these institutions must empower their students rather than just enroll and graduate them. Her book Becoming Hispanic Serving Institutions: Opportunities for Colleges and Universities raises this important question:
What does it mean, at an organizational level, to serve Latinx [and] other racially minoritized, low-income, and first-generation students? While some suggest that graduating students is evidence of serving them, others say that HSIs must provide a culturally enhancing educational experience.
Historically, higher education in the U.S. has upheld white supremacy. From the Native American boarding schools to English-only laws, to the recent elimination of ethnic studies courses, curriculum in the United States has long been intended to subdue and assimilate indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian students rather than to explore and celebrate their intellectual, ethical, and creative differences. To serve these students now, colleges and universities will need to face not just changing national demographics but also this much more disturbing reality—we have never cared to empower people of color. To do so, we need to fully recognize the histories and cultural contributions of people of color. Garcia (2015) concludes: “We can no longer assume that the organizational structures of our current institutions will adequately meet the needs of underrepresented students. Instead, we must find ways to serve them through curricula and programs that place their needs at the center.” Moreover, while culturally relevant pedagogy and antiracist teaching is key to HSI’s like Lehman College, these changes are fundamental to all students in all institutions not only to succeed in today’ changing demographic landscape but also, so they have the tools to interrogate and alter societal structures.
We find ourselves, once again, in one of those transformative periods when those who enter the classroom to teach turn out to be the ones who have the most to learn. This historical juncture of a new civil rights movement for Black Lives Matter and immigration reform should be the wake-up call for academics across the country. Let’s listen to the Latinx Student Alliance, who call for:
“…an education that prioritizes the reflection of the world within its courses, especially in the face of history that has previously erased groups of people from its texts. Lehman College was the first institution to bring forth cultural studies in [the City University of New York (CUNY)], and now is the time for Lehman College to come forward again and lead the rest of CUNY […] We have a great chance to show the benefits and application of what a diverse education can bring to generations.”
Schools like Lehman, which is the university in the northeastern U.S. with the largest Latinx student population, have an obvious obligation to become leaders in culturally responsive and anti-racist pedagogy, not only in the humanities, but across all areas of study. They must, as Garcia argues, not only enroll Latinx students but serve them in the ways they desire. To the extent that HSIs and majority-minority schools succeed in doing so, they will develop “best practices” that can and undoubtedly will be used by less racially diverse colleges and universities as well.
At a time when protests relating to Black Lives Matter have put a spotlight on the question of racial justice in academia, the Latinx Student Alliance letter demonstrates that students of color have never been content with the status quo. Nor should they be. Even HSIs have failed to understand how critical these students are to the future of higher education. To truly embrace their status as majority-minority institutions, HSIs must reorganize themselves in ways designed to sustain the cultures of their students. It is time for us not merely to reform the curriculum, but also to rethink who we are as institutions.
Bibliography
Garcia, Gina Ann. Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Opportunities for Colleges and Universities. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Otgonjargal, Okhidoi. “Culturally Relevant Practices that ‘Serve” students at a Hispanic Serving Institution.” Innovative Higher Education 40 (2015): 345-357.
Dr. Melissa Castillo Planas is an Assistant Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, NY specializing in Latinx Literature and Culture. She is the author of A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture (2020), the poetry collection Coatlicue Eats the Apple (2016), editor of the anthology, ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets (2017), and co-editor of La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades (2016).