UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Universities that have been designated to serve Hispanic students actually elevate whiteness and racial assimilation while marginalizing Black, Indigenous Latinx and Afrolatinx students, according to a College of Education researcher.
“I am a Black woman but I am a Black woman with family ties in Latin America,” said Mildred Boveda, associate professor of education (special education). “All people who are racialized as Hispanic … they do tend to get a certain level of discrimination in the United States. It becomes far more complicated when you look a certain way. Some of us can blend into the dominant culture while some of us will never be able to blend into the supposed American melting pot.”
Boveda, along with two other U.S.-born Latinx education scholars — "Latinx" being a gender-neutral term for the Latino/a community — present their testimonios in a new paper to draw attention to the tensions they experienced as racialized Latinx scholars and how racial ideologies empower dominant groups (e.g., white people) to wield power over nondominant groups (e.g., Black and Indigenous people) in Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). A testimonio, according to the Center for Intercultural Dialogue, is a “first-person account by the person (narrator) who has faced instances of social and political inequality, oppression or any specific form of marginalization.”
The paper, “Hispanic-Serving Institutions as Racialized Organizations: Elevating Intersectional Consciousness to Reframe the ‘H’ in HSIs” was published recently in AERA Open. Boveda’s co-authors are Blanca Elizabeth Vega and Román Liera, assistant professors of educational leadership at Montclair State University.
An HSI, according to the U.S. Department of Education, is eligible for federal funding and has an enrollment of undergraduate full-time equivalent students that is at least 25% Hispanic. However, Boveda said, unlike Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and tribal colleges that have a mission statement explicitly intended for minoritized students, HSIs are designated due to demographic changes in the local area.
“If the institution doesn’t think about what to do for this particular student population, then it’s pretty much including students into existing structures that were already (designed) for centering and prioritizing white dominant culture,” she said.
In their paper, the researchers share their collective testimonios to illustrate the role that the racial ideologies "Blanqueamiento" and "Mestizaje" play in the interactions between HSIs and Latinx students. Blanqueamiento refers to the strategies used to whiten a population both genetically and culturally; Mestizaje elevates racial mixture by dominant group members as evidence that racism does not exist.
“Both Blanqueamiento and Mestizaje are embedded in postsecondary organizations, including HSIs, and perpetuate the invisibility of Latinxs, specifically those who embody Black and Indigenous consciousness, cultures, and physical characteristics,” the researchers wrote.
In Boveda’s scholarship, she uses the terms "intersectional competence" and "intersectional consciousness" to refer to educators' understanding of diversity and how students, families and colleagues have multiple sociocultural markers that intersect in complex and nuanced ways. She designed the Intersectional Competence Measure (ICM) to assess teachers’ preparedness for an increasingly diverse student population. Boveda’s testimonio for the paper is based on her experience of developing the ICM while working with students of color at an HSI.
“My research really wanted to attend to teachers and aspiring teachers who understood diversity in a personal way,” Boveda said. “But almost all tenure-track faculty (at the HSI) were white. Here you are, getting federal funding, recognition as an institution that values diversity … but that wasn’t really the case. I had far more faculty of color at elite Ivy League institutions than at HSIs.”
Boveda’s testimonio, she said, was intended to shed light on the power dynamics of racialized organizations. In a racialized institution, there are far more people of color toward the bottom of the social hierarchy but as you go higher, “it becomes increasingly white,” said Boveda. Those dynamics were reflected in the HSI where Boveda conducted her research, as undergraduate students were mostly Hispanic but faculty were predominantly white.
“That becomes a problem if the school is getting funding because there’s 25% students of color,” she said. “But it’s a racialized organization where the people with the least power to influence and shape it are people of color — that becomes something you need to critique.”
Another theme that the researchers’ paper explores is intersectionality, which involves examining multiple categories such as race, ethnicity, language and class to understand how certain people are advantaged or disadvantaged in society. In her testimonio, Vega recalled her experience as a faculty member at a designated HSI in which she was “told that my student evaluations may be low because I am ‘too Latina’ and speak with a thick New York accent, write about race, and discuss equity in my courses.” Vega also wrote about an HSI student who identified as AfroLatina and described the lack of validation from the HSI for students who identified as she did.
“No centers there helped them understand how Blackness and Black people were positioned in society, and mentors were lacking,” Vega wrote.
In Liero’s testimonio, he discussed how he studied at an HSI where select faculty were training to become equity advocates that could mentor the university’s growing Latinx student population. In those spaces, he wrote, he observed how senior faculty devalued the skills and experiences of non-white Latinas.
One of the researchers’ main arguments, Boveda said, is that the term “Hispanic” is Euro-centric and divisive.
“Making all of ourselves Hispanic within HSIs is a form of Blanqueamiento and Mestizaje that erases and removes our Indigeneity and our African heritages. When we talk about Hispanics and HSIs and we don’t look at the complexity or the diversity that exists in ‘Hispanic,’ that’s a form of Blanqueamiento and Mestizaje that is actually anti-Black and anti-Indigenous.”
As more universities across the country are pursuing and attaining HSI designations, Boveda and her co-authors said they are concerned that students of color will continue to be underserved. Beyond categorizing a school as “Hispanic serving,” they recommend for administrators to pay careful attention to the mission, vision, curricula and faculty who are shaping the culture of these institutions of higher education.