Daisy Verduzco Reyes wanted to learn how college attendance shapes Latino students’ sense of their place in campus life, and in broader civic life. So the assistant professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut spent two years attending meeting after meeting, and organizational event after organizational event, at three colleges of different kinds.
Such dynamics interested her, she said in an interview, because when she went to the University of California at Santa Barbara as the first member of her San Fernando Valley family to enroll in higher education, she was troubled by tensions among Latino groups over which political stances and actions around ethnic identity were most worthy. “I wouldn’t have thought to study different Latino groups if I hadn’t tried to join them when I was in college,” Reyes said.
She reports the results of her research in Learning to Be Latino: How Colleges Shape Identity Politics (Rutgers University Press, 2018). The gist of her findings is that each campus — one a liberal-arts college, one a regional university, and one a research institution — “incorporates Latino students differently by adopting and implementing multicultural and diversity projects in its own way,” as she writes. The Latino students’ interactions with one another and with various other groups on campus “influence much more than students’ academic journeys.”
Those interactions shape not only Latino students’ academic achievement but also how they end up “defining what it means to be Latino” and engaging and responding to Latinos’ place in American society, Reyes writes.
College administrators would do well to pay heed to the way similarities and differences in colleges’ cultures affect those students, she suggests, because more than 70 percent of college-age Latinos enroll in higher education, and Latinos account for more than one-sixth of the United States population.
Reyes says that when she undertook to study the campus characteristics that influence how Latino students come to understand their place on campus and in society, she didn’t think the type of campus was going to affect her findings, but it did.
For example, at the research university, Latino groups competed for institutional funds, which led to conflict among them.
At the regional university, almost half of the students were of Latino background, but they spent little time on campus and were less attentive to larger issues of Latino identity than they were to their origins in Latin American countries, such as Mexico and Guatemala.
On the liberal-arts campus, cohesion among Latino groups was greater, apparently because all students lived in something of a campus bubble, and in part because Latino students, who are frequently, like Reyes, the first in their families to attend college, often felt marginalized on a campus of predominantly affluent students.
Other factors that played a role in the differences included residential arrangements, the health and variety of diversity programs, policies for incorporating nonmajority students, student-teacher ratio, and racial and ethnic demographics.
In varying combinations, such factors influence how Latino students relate to one another and to others on campus, including administrators. In that sense, the combinations of approaches that help Latino students thrive on campuses, and the harmful forces such as “microaggressions” that they might experience from other students, compose “a kind of hidden curriculum that greatly extends colleges’ pedagogical effects,” she writes. It shapes students’ sense of “ethnic-racial boundaries and identities” and, from that, the political agendas they may adopt to deal with issues that trouble them.
Administrators can take a variety of steps to help Latino students find their way to fulfilling political and social roles, Reyes said. Administrators can, for example, create courses about their campus’s own history of activism against racial inequities, or even first-year seminars on educational inequality — “so that the weight of making a change does not rest mainly on Latino students’ shoulders.”
Peter Monaghan is a national correspondent for The Chronicle. Email him at pmonaghan3@mac.com.
