What It Means, Politically, to Serve Hispanics

So rapid is the growth of enrollments of Latinx students at American colleges that the time is more than ripe for making their years there more rewarding, says Gina Ann Garcia.

An assistant professor of higher education at the University of Pittsburgh, she writes in Becoming Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Opportunities for Colleges and Universities (Johns Hopkins University Press) that such institutions are often found wanting in higher-education circles, in large part because they are unreasonably compared with other kinds of colleges.

To illustrate her analysis of the history and purpose of colleges with large Latinx enrollments, she presents three case studies of such institutions in or near Chicago. In that area, she said in an interview, Latinx enrollments are booming, but “there’s not a lot of conversation about what it means to be an HSI,” or Hispanic-serving institution.

“Hispanic-serving institution” has been a federal designation since 1992 for colleges with Latinx undergraduate enrollments of at least 25 percent. In 2015, Garcia writes, 472 two- or four-year degree-granting institutions met that mark, while 323 others were approaching it. That same year, HSIs enrolled 64 percent of the country’s three million Latinx undergraduates, and Latinx students made up 18.5 percent of total undergraduate enrollment.

Latinx students at Hispanic-serving institutions are, like many of their classmates, disproportionately low-income, first-generation, and immigrants. That makes it unfair, Garcia argues, for HSIs to be evaluated by the “myths of meritocracy” that form part of a dominant narrative based on “white normative standards.” Under that “deficit-based perspective,” she says, HSIs are judged by what they are not, rather than what they are or could be.

Many of the “indicators of prestige and effectiveness” are ones that HSIs will inevitably struggle to attain, she says. Those include high test scores, selectivity, high graduation and persistence rates, large federal research budgets, and numerous faculty publications.

During the two years that Garcia, an organizational theorist, spent studying her three sample HSIs, she found herself wondering “whether HSIs are reinforcing the dominant white narrative or challenging it.” She says HSIs need to ask themselves: Which ones merely enroll Latinx students, which ones help them gain academic credentials, and which ones go further and enhance their students’ cultural experiences?

All of those roles have merit, Garcia says, but her portrayals of the HSIs, which are identified pseudonymously, make clear which approach she most favors: providing a culturally engaging environment for students and enhancing their sense of belonging, engagement, and racial or ethnic identity while also maximizing their academic attainment.

Ways to do that, she says, include involving students in service learning and civic engagement, teaching the history of efforts to increase racial and ethnic justice and equity in the United States, and incorporating bilingualism into writing composition courses that teach critical thinking, audience awareness, and self-expression.

Success in such approaches could be considered valid markers of institutional standing for HSIs, she says. She suggests other markers, too, including affordability, low student debt, high levels of financial aid, and graduates’ economic and work-force fortunes.

One measure in particular clearly galvanizes her in her research and advocacy: Are HSIs rewarding faculty and staff members for “doing work that is anti-racist, anti-nativist, decolonial, and anti-oppressive”? In other words, she says: Are they “centering the voices and experiences of the people” within their walls?

She throws down a challenge to administrators and faculty members at HSIs to not commit to white normative standards but instead to “learn to live the duality” of pursuing both generally used and also HSI-specific measures of success, a combination that she characterizes as grounded in “justice and equity.”

“We must decolonize our institutional structures,” she writes.

On the phone from Pittsburgh, she puts it another way: “Being woke isn’t enough — you have to act against those racist structures.”