U-Md. Weighs Creating Latino Studies Minor
Committee to Take Up Issue Today

By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 18, 2008

Maryland's flagship public university has departments in African American Studies and Women's Studies. It has academic programs in Asian American Studies, Jewish Studies and Persian Studies. But there is no U.S. Latino Studies Program there -- or, for that matter, at any university in the mid-Atlantic region.

A 10-year campaign to establish a Latino studies program at the University of Maryland at College Park will hit a milestone today when a University Senate committee considers allowing students to minor in the field.

At a time when Latinos are the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority group, students and professors said approval would be only a first step toward meeting their academic needs.

"This has been extremely frustrating," said Ana Patricia Rodriguez, an assistant professor and longtime activist on the issue. "You can see the great need in our local area to have people who know about Latinos who can provide attention, services, et cetera. It is important for our students to graduate with this background, yet our hands are tied because we don't have a structure at the school."

University officials said they are making progress. About $120,000 was provided in 2006 by the then-provost to write a proposal for a minor in U.S. Latino Studies. Within the past month, the minor was approved by a panel in the College of Arts and Humanities as well as by its dean, James F. Harris.

Harris said he expects the minor to be approved and plans to give it two years to see if students enroll in the program and faculty members want to teach its courses. Harris would then consider broadening it to a full program. Expanding the program could cost $300,000 to $500,000 for new faculty and other resources, said Ruth Enid Zambrana, a professor in Women's Studies and the senior Latina faculty member on campus.

Latino studies is a complex, evolving field that focuses on the history, culture, literature and the social fabric of Latino communities in the United States. Obstacles to creating such programs include misunderstanding about the field and debate about whether such programs are legitimate scholarship. Lack of funding also is an issue. The Persian Studies center at College Park, for example, was established with a multimillion-dollar donation from an outside institute.

"There seems to be a common underpinning: the concern that it is simply a political project, whether as a variation of affirmative action, political correctness or inverse segregationist impulses among Latinos," said Vilma Santiago-Irizarry, director of the Latino Studies Program at Cornell University.

Politics, too, play a role: African American and Women's Studies programs were created in part because of political pressure when the two groups began to organize and become involved in the political process. Latinos are still finding their political voice.

College Park officials acknowledged the frustration but said they are moving forward in a number of areas, including putting Latino student advisers in key departments, planning events and responding to "an increasing demand for an academic program," said Nariman Farvardin, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.

"It's critically important, however, to know that developing an academic program should not be a top-down process," he wrote in an e-mail. "Student demands must be measured against available resources and assurances that academic capacity and faculty expertise are in place."

Scholars said that public flagship universities have a special responsibility to serve Latino communities and that too many schools are giving short shrift to a group that represents 15 percent of the U.S. population and could reach 25 percent by 2050. Angel David Nieves, an assistant professor, was more blunt: "They are happy to have us cleaning their bathrooms and cooking their food, but they are not realizing the significance of how Latinos are the foundation of the region. I just don't know how [the university] can be a serious place without this kind of program."

In Maryland, Latinos account for about 6 percent of the population, according to the U.S. Census. Latinos make up 14 percent of the population in Montgomery County and 12 percent in Prince George's County. At the College Park campus, Latinos make up about 5 percent of 25,000 undergraduate students and about 3 percent of faculty. A 2007 Chronicle of Higher Education survey said the university ranks behind similar schools in the hiring of minority faculty.

"After 10 years of voicing the importance of this, it has to be made a priority," Zambrana said.

Many of the U.S. Latino programs at about 120 universities were born of aggressive student activism. It took a hunger strike at the University of California at Los Angeles and the takeover of an administration building at Cornell, both in the 1990s, to create full programs. There have been no such protests in the Washington area.

At Catholic University in the District, students can receive an undergraduate minor in Latin American and Latino Studies. Spokesman Victor Nakas said the minor was established to avoid "creating a dichotomy" between the two disciplines. At Georgetown University, there are individual classes on related subjects.

U-Md.'s proposed minor requires undergraduates to take five three-credit classes, two of them newly created requirements that provide historical and contemporary overviews of the field. Electives can be chosen from existing courses in such fields as Spanish and Latin American studies.

The dominant Latino population in a region has typically determined the field of study. In the Southwest and California, it was Chicano studies; in New York and Chicago, Puerto Rican studies. Nieves and other faculty said that because at least one-third of Latinos in the Washington region come from Central America, a full program could focus research on that demographic.

Two seniors close to graduating have completed the requirements for the proposed minor and are anxiously awaiting the decision by the University Senate committee.

The two are founding members of a student group called Latinos Unidos, dedicated to promoting Latino interests on campus.

"If the minor proposal goes through, I would be the first Latina to receive it at the University of Maryland," said Evelyn Lopez, 21, a graduate of Northwestern High School in Prince George's. "If the University of Maryland wants to call itself an international school, it should do this."

Colleen Esper, 22, came to College Park from a poor rural town in Louisiana "looking for diversity."

"It's stressful not knowing, because it is down to the wire," she said of the proposed minor.

Part of the debate, said Ricardo Ortiz, a professor at Georgetown University who has an expertise in U.S. Latino affairs, concerns the legitimacy of the study.

"This may have to do with this mentality that academic departments are more legitimate when they are organized around methodology," Ortiz said. "Anthropology is a methodology. History is a methodology. When you are into these content-based fields, like U.S. Latino studies or African American studies, that can look to some less like a scholarly endeavor. But I think we can make the case that these subjects can be methodologies."

Arelis Hernandez, 20, a College Park junior who wants to major in U.S. Latino studies, said she believes there is another reason for resistance.

"When you look at U.S.-Latino history and you see how much the United States has intervened in Latin American countries and how U.S. policies have shaped the reasons people come here, you realize that it counters what you learned about in American history classes in middle school and high school," she said. "It can open a wound."