- Author: Dr. Gina A. Garcia
- Title: Becoming Hispanic Serving Institutions: Opportunities for Colleges and Universities
- Publisher: John Hopkins University Press
- Format: Paperback
- ISBN-10: 1421427370
- ISBN-13: 978-1421427379
- Amazon Book Purchase (Buy this book, dang it!)
When the University of Arizona (UA) became an Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), I remember very vividly being in a meeting where we were going to pursue a federal grant for which we were now eligible given our new designation. The conversation, as we were considering how to frame our proposal, kept coming back to the “need for the grant to serve all Wildcats” – which meant White students.
To be blunt, that pissed me off. I get that we’re in Arizona – a state that hasn’t exactly been hospitable to Brown folks – and a program specifically designed to serve this population might ruffle some feathers.
However, there is a deeper question this poses: Why would we pursue this grant if the center is not going to enhance our ability to serve Latinx students?
Oh, right, we exist in the neoliberal academy where, with deference to the Wu Tang Clan, Cash Rules Everything Around Me (C.R.E.A.M.).
However, all is not lost as I still see a lot of potential for HSIs in large part because of Gina Garcia’s game-changer of a book Becoming Hispanic Serving Institutions. Establishing herself as a leader in the field of higher education, she guides and supports institutional administrators, faculty, and staff, at HSIs to really center the needs of Latinx students.
Gina gives us a language to understand the heterogeneity of HSIs throughout the country as she differentiates among Latinx-Enrolling, Latinx-Enhancing, Latinx-Producing, and Latinx-Serving.
This language is more than just a typology. It is a challenge – a challenge to higher education institutions to do more than simply enroll Latinx students, but actually to actually do the heavy lift of transforming their engrained organizational cultures to truly support and center Latinx students and their needs.
Gina tirelessly works throughout the country with institutions to support their work at truly trying to center servingness in the work that they do. She is one of the rare academics who is a true public intellectual; not satisfied with publications, accolades, and citations (although she’s got plenty of those); making her deep theorizing and empirical work positively affect the actual lives of Latinx students.
I have seen firsthand the impact that Gina’s work can have as it has guided a number of the efforts at the UA to move us more towards institutionally embodying Latinx-Servingness under the incredible leadership of Marla Franco and Judy Marquez Kiyama, leading to the creation of the HSI Fellows Program, the STEM in HSI Working Group, and the Centering Servingness Webinar Series to name a few.
Will any of these initiatives by themselves transform the UA? Of course not. The point is that each is individually important and by coordinating these efforts they are actually making some important and substantive changes at the institution. Essentially, this is what applications of Gina’s work can look like!
Gina’s work is visionary in the sense that so few, if any, HSIs actually could be defined as Latinx-Serving. This is what makes the work so critically important because it is not simply bound by what is. Gina imagines what can be, challenges us to co-create that vision with her, and then collectively do the heavy lifts to transform and truly center the needs of Latinx students within our higher education institutions.
At her core, Gina is dreaming – freedom dreaming – a liberatory vision of higher education while developing the tools to move toward that ever elusive goal. Mad respect for the creativity, dedication, and leadership on this critically important issue!
Peace,
NC c/s
P.S. I have known Gina, Marla, and Judy, for years, so using a formal “Dr.” or “Professor” when writing about them is awkward and stilted. Dear reader, remember the politics of Faculty of Color frequently being addressed as “Ms.” instead of “Dr.”, and please do not take this as an invitation to be too familiar. Thanks for your consideration!
P.P.S. If you want to be an academic hype person and write a blog post in this space, hit me up at chicanostocracy@gmail.com. I’m always looking for opportunities to lift up each other, and I am happy to open this space to genuine folks looking to do right by their crew.