Unpacking the Performativity of Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) Designation: Holding Universities Accountable and Developing a Call to Action

Abstract

Against the backdrop of historic and contemporary attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, what could ethical accountability and a call to action look like in Hispanic Serving Institutions? There are only a handful of institutions in the nation to simultaneously hold the Carnegie distinction of “very high research activity” and the designation of Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). Yet some of these institutions have historically provided little if any resources to support and retain Hispanic-identifying students, and when programs exist, they tend to be performative rather than substantive. We employ intersectionality as critical inquiry and praxis (action/reflection) to name and shed light on the various mechanisms that continue to marginalize Hispanic students. In this case study, we attempt to examine institutional administrative data to shine a light on the underrepresentation of Latine students and faculty within the institution. Instead, however, we describe the practice of institutional and statistical gaslighting we encountered while trying to obtain this data. We then utilize content analysis of archival documents of two university departments and combine these findings with autoethnographic data to highlight both the past and current state of Latine faculty hires. We further examine the lack of student services and the precarious funding situations of Hispanic-centered programs at the heart of Hispanic student success, and the impact of Presidential Executive orders prohibiting the use of federal funds to support these resources. Finally, we include steps that can lead to institutional transformation as an ethical imperative to serve all students.

1. Introduction

Remarks by the University President at a recent Latine Graduation Ceremony at a Hispanic Serving Institution provides fertile ground for exploring racialized power dynamics across many HSIs across the country. The President began by asking how many students grew up in a household where parents/guardians did not have the opportunity to earn a four-year college degree. About half of the students raised their hands. What the president did not say was that Upward Bound, one of the federally funded and highly effective programs in providing custom tailored mentoring and academic support to aspiring first-generation college high school students, had been shuttered earlier that academic year. Instead, the president painted a rosy picture of the university accountability to Latine students:

You are an extraordinary group of students, but you also had help… the invaluable support from [the Latine Ethnic Center], where [the] staff have worked tirelessly to make sure you found the guidance and resources necessary to help you complete your journey…

The University is also proud to be a Hispanic-serving institution. With nearly half of our student body now identifying as Latinx, Latino, Chicano, or Hispanic, we’re one of the very few Hispanic-serving institutions in the nation that also happen to be Research 1 universities… a distinction that this university wears proudly. That means we are here for you no matter what your educational goals or aspirations are—whether you’re aiming for a classroom or a boardroom, a music conservatory, or a natural laboratory. And there’s a reason we… have a nationally recognized [Chicanx/Latine] studies program that’s the envy of the nation. You, our students, have brought to it your boundless energy, curiosity, and enthusiasm, supported by some of the most dedicated faculty and staff in the field. You have brought to [the university] your culture and your language, and your warm sense of community and family, and our campus and our community are stronger for your being here.

(President’s Speech—Latine Graduation)

This excerpt begs many questions: How could a severely underfunded academic program with less tenure track faculty than the average program in its respective college be the “envy” of the nation? How many courses in the institution outside of the Latine-focused program are focused on Latine students? How can we explain the paradoxes of diversity as discourse and the reality of unequal distribution of resources for diversity work—specifically work that centers Latine students at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) (Ahmed 2020; Ray 2019)? Despite the “fetishization of good intentions” (Fine 1991) through performative discourses and representations, glaring disconnects between the narratives that celebrate HSI status and the reality of its underfunded and under-supported Latine population and programs remain (Vargas and Villa-Palomino 2019). Research shows that many HSIs struggle to cultivate the next generation of Latine scholars, leaders, and practitioners (Garcia 2023). They also miss opportunities to center the realities and knowledge production of Latine students, faculty, and communities and little has changed over recent decades (Aguilar-Hernández et al. 2021; Vargas and Villa-Palomino 2019; Garcia 2023). Yet, the performative embrace of HSI status by university leaders is a common practice, and one that does nothing to address the glaring inequities and barriers that Hispanic students still face at institutions of higher education that have been recognized for their supposed missions to serve them (Ray 2019). This contributes to on-going challenges, including the status quo of “ornamental intersectionality” (Bilge 2013), where the diversity of the students is performatively mentioned, but the core guiding concepts and ethics of intersectionality are not substantively engaged. An alternative could be transformational intersectionality as critical inquiry and praxis (action/reflection) at the individual, institutional and structural level by that engages in reckoning with place-based history, power analysis, relationality, context, equity and social justice (Collins and Bilge 2020; López 2023).

The Higher Education Act amendment of 1998 defined HSIs as accredited, degree-granting intuition in which Hispanic students comprise at least 25% of the undergraduate enrollment (HACU n.d.). While the amendment recognized the significance of institutions serving a large number of Hispanic students, it did not provide guidance on how these institutions should adequately serve Latine students. Institutions have full autonomy to determine the practices and resources they believe best support their student population. The designation has demonstrated to have positive outcomes, as some institutions use the funding to enhance campus organizations and culture (Gonzalez et al. 2020). However, not all institutions provide the same level of support; some are only Hispanic enrolling, failing to provide equitable outcomes for Latine students (Garcia 2019). We aim to rectify “selective realities” (Anzaldúa 1990) and tear up the “racial contract” (Mills 1997) at HSIs and inspire future generations to catalyze enduring institutional transformations in curriculum, resource distribution, and praxis anchored in flexible solidarity (Collins 2019) and justice for posterity (Aguilar-Hernández et al. 2021; Battershill and Ross 2022; Garcia 2021; Sandoval 2000). We ask: How does HSI performativity continue to harm the collective Latine campus community? What can a critical evaluation of institutional data about student and faculty demographics, access and outcomes in HSIs reveal about the dynamics of gatekeeping? In this work, we apply “intersectional servingness,” as a framework that recognizes “the importance of accounting for intersectional individual identities while simultaneously accounting for domains of power and historicity” (Garcia and Cuellar 2023).

The institution we examine is significant, as it has held an HSI designation for over 15 years. The four-year institution is currently one of the few minority-majority Research-1 universities in the country, with over 50% of students identifying as Latine. The mid-size university also has four satellite campuses, which are smaller and located at a significant distance from the main university. Satellite campuses offer higher education opportunities such as associate degrees and certificates to students who would otherwise not have access due to location or financial reasons (Peake et al. 2013). Despite being part of the same institution, satellite campuses have distinct leadership, student bodies, and community partnerships, resulting in different designations and achievements (American Council on Education 2018).

We employ autoethnography, institutional memory, and a curricular genealogy to document ontological and epistemological violence across two departments and reveal the institutional mechanisms of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and colorblind racism in HSIs. Further, we highlight Hispanic serving performativity that does not align with actual university practices through statistical gaslighting and gatekeeping. We also highlight historical and continued performativity in the underrepresentation of Latine faculty and Latine-oriented courses through curricular genealogy analysis. Finally, we spotlight the continued pattern of precarious funding of saddlebag programs and spaces where Latine students, faculty, and staff build community and support often with little or no institutional help, but which the university co-opts as evidence of its supposed commitment to serving Hispanics.

Critical Intersectional Self-Reflexivity & Framework

We are committed to critical and self-implicating reflexivity that acknowledges our intersectional social locations, narratives of belonging, and ethical and political commitments. We believe that transparency about our relational positionality, whether in terms of relational racialization, citizenship status, gender, class, etc., in grids of power matters for meaning-making, knowledge production, teaching, and community impact (Yuval-Davis 2011; Acosta 2018; Battershill and Ross 2022; Collins 2019; Crenshaw 1991; Hurtado 1996; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Vidal-Ortiz 2004; Zerai 2016).

Emily Castillo is a first-generation college working-class Chicana whose father was a formerly undocumented migrant with a fourth-grade education and whose mother was a child migrant worker in the Midwest who dropped out of school in 8th grade to become her grandmother’s caretaker. She is an alumnus of the Latine Ethnic Center (LEC) and served as a Graduate Research Fellow for the center’s research fellowship from 2015–2022 while earning her PhD in sociology. Rubi Castorena is the daughter of two Mexican immigrant parents and a first-generation college student. With the cultural resources and skills offered by her parents and community, She graduated from this institution in 2021 and is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of California Irvine. She is also a former undergraduate fellow of the Latine center’s research fellowship, where Castillo served as her graduate mentor and López as her faculty mentor. Nancy López is a sociology professor at the university. Her scholarship, teaching, and service are guided by intersectionality—the importance of examining the simultaneity of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and other systems of inequalities across a variety of social outcomes, including education, for developing contextualized solutions that advance social justice. She is a Black Latina, New York City-born daughter of Dominican immigrants with a second-grade education rich in cultural wealth. Spanish is her first language. She is the first woman of color tenured in sociology and the first woman of the African diaspora tenured in the College of Arts and Sciences (2008) and promoted to full professor (2018).

We use an intersectional framework that acknowledges that race, gender, ethnicity, class origin, nativity, and language as systems of oppression/resistance are analytically distinct, yet simultaneous. We argue that this practice should be a new normative principle for institutional change in HSIs. Through this analysis, we hope to plant what Garcia (2023) has described as “freedom dreaming”—adopted from Robin D.G. Kelley’s conceptualization of freedom dreams (Kelley 2002)—and a desired more complete, accurate, and transformative narrative and theory of change of Latine resistance and activism in HSIs. To advance this vision, we depart from the premise that we must know our past to understand our present and advance a more just future.

2. Materials and Methods

We employ intersectionality as inquiry and praxis for our case study as the central methodology of this project. Our analysis is based on archival content analysis of data collected from Fall 2020 to Spring 2021 combined with the autoethnographies of the Latina authors. We used the University’s Digital Repository to collect course catalogs dating back to 1935. Through the Ethnography of the University research project that Dr. López catalyzed, we created a curricular genealogy of Latine courses focused on race, gender, and class from the course catalogs. This data is supplemented with institutional observations that Dr. Castillo developed over eight years of working with the LEC. Data was previously collected regarding the Latine instructors and the courses they taught in the sociology and history departments (Yin 2009). Some of the Latine instructors on the catalog date back to the late 1940s. Due to a lack of documentation on instructors’ racial and ethnic identity, we assigned an assumed ethnicity based on the instructors’ names and known social location based on document evaluations. Researchers have identified the names that reveal a person’s affiliation to a specific ethnic or religious group (Khosravi 2012), and from the names on the catalog we assume that they are of Latine backgrounds. Our theory of change is that truth-telling and counter-stories from curricular genealogies can catalyze critical self-reflection at the individual and department levels to galvanize equity and justice at HSIs (Risam and Bordalejo 2019; Vazquez Heilig et al. 2021; Risam 2015; Vargas and Villa-Palomino 2019; Zambrana 2019). This model can be scaled up to other HSIs and provides a starting point for institutional leaders to engage in transforming HSIs for equity and justice by addressing the tenets of mission, identity, and strategic purpose outlined by Gina A. Garcia (2023, pp. 27–28). Importantly, we note that in this work we chose to anonymize the institutions and individuals and provide pseudonyms for ethnic centers and programs. While this does not align with our practice of rendering visible institutions and actors that cause harm, we recognize that the possibility of retaliation in these spaces exists and have provided anonymity to protect those that could be targeted.

3. Results

3.1. Institutional Gatekeeping & Statistical Gaslighting

Given that nearly half of the students identify as Hispanic, we first attempted to utilize public facing institutional data about faculty in the dashboards produced by the office of data analytics to bring attention to the alarmingly small number of tenure-track Hispanic professors, college by college, with attention to disproportionate average ratios of Hispanic students to Hispanic professors when compared with white students (Vargas et al. 2020, p. 47). However, even in this process we are wary of the accuracy of the data as we encountered several instances of institutional gatekeeping and statistical gaslighting (López et al. 2023, 2025; López and Mehta 2025; Broadhead and Rist 1976; Vasquez 2022). For example, when we inquired about statistics that wildly misrepresented and overinflated the number of Latino faculty in Sociology, an unnamed staff person at the office that is charged with analyzing quantitative data on the institution affirmed that these numbers were correct because the differing numbers represented differing codes funding a particular position, implying that our concerns about the misrepresentation were not warranted and to date, the inaccurate numbers present problematic and factually incorrect descriptive statistics (Zuberi 2001).

The following exchange was sent by a staff person in this office to Dr. López and another Latine faculty member who were requesting data related to a project deliverable for a federal grant that totaled over a million dollars that included intersectional analysis of graduation race, gender, parent level of education, and ethnicity at the institution as a major grant deliverable:

You must know that the type of request you are making is highly unusual and would require an immense amount of resources to fulfill. Additionally, [our office] does not provide any student-level data containing any PII [personally identifiable information], as that is outside the scope of our responsibilities, and we lack the authority to release such data. Thus, we will not fulfill or consider fulfilling any such request. This is clearly stated on our website.

This response begs several questions: Data for whom and for what? If this institution is a research-intensive university, why would the office charged with collecting demographic data respond by suggesting that analysis of student outcomes is outside of their responsibility? Who’s afraid of innovations in student success metrics? This is an example of what Ray (2019) has called decoupling of stated aims of advancing trailblazing research and service to the people of the state and the actual priorities and practices in racialized organizations.

On another occasion, when López asked about major discrepancies in the “official counts of Latine faculty” in her department, an anonymous person who replied using the email of the data office responded:

Unfortunately, we do not provide data for requests when already available via the dashboards. The difference between the “Sociology” and “Sociology Department” options has to do with the organizational code to which each faculty is assigned. There are separate organizational codes for “Sociology” and “Sociology Department,” which is why they are kept separate.

López describes this response as “statistical gaslighting” (López et al. 2023, 2025; López and Mehta 2025) because it is an example of the use of quantification and numbers to question one’s reality (See also Davis and Ernst 2011, 2020 on racial gaslighting). The dashboards and control of data (who controls the institutional data that we have collected) are part and parcel of the politics of racialized knowledge projection, ontologies, and epistemologies of ignorance (Mills 1997; Zuberi 2001; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). There is also a lack of transparency in how institutional analytics collect data and how the numbers are determined for their dashboard. For example, using first-hand knowledge about the number of “box checkers”—individuals that skew data by checking/not checking boxes and having their identity imputed as Latine/Hispanic, even though they are not—is one route for inflation of Hispanic faculty numbers.

The control of de-identified statistical data on student outcomes is another way in which the performativity of HSI status continues unabated. In 2023, López and another Latine faculty member requested data from the data office and the Registrars for a major deliverable for their HSI-centered NSF grant. Every single street-level bureaucrat, all white women, created roadblocks. After much back and forth explaining that the study was requesting the same FERPA-exempt de-identified data from 2015 that had been provided nearly a decade earlier for a very similar project that resulted in a highly cited peer-reviewed article (López et al. 2018), López wondered if the difference was that the previously released data had been requested by a white woman faculty member while in 2023 it had been two Latina faculty requesting the data. Hurtado’s (1996, p. 135) explanation of the “pendejo game” is illustrative of racialized dynamics in HSIs: “The claim of ignorance is one of my most powerful weapons because, while you spend your time trying to enlighten me, everything remains the same. The “Pendejo Game” will allow me to gain intimate knowledge of your psyche, which will perfect my understanding of how to dominate you.” The previous examples illustrate the machinations of the pendejo game when data is used to reproduce whiteness or ideologies and practices that uphold white supremacy (Mills 1997).

These scenarios speak to the need to develop data transparency with ethical accuracy rather than aesthetic accuracy. Ethical accuracy stems from a commitment to social justice, equity, and liberation. In contrast, aesthetic accuracy is performative and for compliance only (López et al. 2018). Ground truthing the quantitative data with qualitative data is not only required but can also shed light on the dynamics within racialized organizations (Ray 2019). As a result of these practices, we can only speak for the data that we were able to physically collect ourselves and we caution other institutional researchers to be critical of data that lacks transparency and that is so heavily safeguarded by mid-level actors.

3.2. Ethnography of Institutional Departments: Intersectional Curricular Genealogy

We aim to rectify “selective realities” (Anzaldúa 1990, p. xxi) about the curricular state of HSIs and inspire future generations to catalyze enduring institutional transformations anchored in flexible solidarity and justice for posterity (Aguilar-Hernández et al. 2021; Battershill and Ross 2022; Garcia 2021; Sandoval 2000). We conducted a curricular genealogy and timeline of courses focused on Latine studies, race, ethnicity, gender, and class in two departments at the University: Sociology and History. We argue that centering the voices, ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies, knowledge production, and aspirations of Latine academics and activistas honors legacies of struggle for posterity and catalyzes equity and Justice in HSIs (Baca Zinn 2024).

As a Latina student who graduated from the university’s sociology undergraduate program, Castorena incorporates her autoethnography into the findings. The aim of this is to highlight the direct impact that the data findings have on the experience and trajectory of Latine students within the university at large, and within the sociology department specifically. When Castorena first started college, her career aspirations were unclear, and in her first semester, she took Introduction to Sociology with a first-generation college graduate and untenured Chicana instructor to fulfill her social science requirements. She did not know at the time that this course would spark her passion for Sociology. The instructor, an adjunct lecturer and one of the only Latinas in the department, created a syllabus that broadly introduced students to the topic and incorporated a space for students to feel welcomed. After attending office hours several times, Castorena began to feel comforted and supported. As a first-generation student, she was looking for a place that would welcome her, and this cultivated space encouraged her to major in Sociology.

As she began her sociology career, she noticed that those feelings of support and community were limited to certain spaces cultivated by Latines in the department. Drawing from data collected from the University Digital Repository, we found that the number of Latine instructors is significantly low in comparison to non-Latine instructors. Since the foundation of the Sociology and History departments, the number of Latine instructors on record has stayed consistently low, with small fluctuations happening in the late 50s to the mid-80s, contributing to limited spaces of community created by faculty that look like the student body. The most helpful and welcoming educators and mentors forCastorena were the very few who had similar experiences to hers. However, since the Sociology department’s foundation in 1935, there have only been 12 Latine instructors on record, 8 of those men, while only 4 were women. The history department has had even fewer Latine instructors even though it has existed since the university’s 1889 foundation. It has only had 9 Latine instructors—8 Latinos and 1 Emeritus Latina.

Another pattern was that Latine instructors were largely the ones teaching courses that addressed race, racism, and structural inequalities in the U.S. and Latin America. Since the establishment of the Sociology department, the number of classes that covered these topics was around five courses within a decade. From the late 1950s to the mid-1980s, the number of classes that addressed minority groups and structural racism as part of the course title or description doubled. During this time, new courses were being offered that centered on the experiences of minority communities. These included “Sociology of the Barrio,” “Seminario de Investigación sobre la Sociedad Mejicana-Americana,” and “Urban Society in Latin America.” In History, Latine instructors taught “History of the Southwest, Mexican and American Period” and “The United States-Mexico Border.”

The implementation of these courses is not an indicator of institutional conscience, however. Baca Zinn and Mirandè (2020) identified that before the 1960s, attention to Latine communities and intellectuals was minimal. Curricular and faculty changes across different departments did not happen because of faculty demands, or changes in student demographics, but because of social movements outside the university (Slaughter 1997). Through the Chicano and Civil Rights Movement, changes began to happen at universities across the U.S. It was not until Chicanx Studies developed that the social sciences began to expand research interests. Departments began shifting from centering European epistemology to race and people of color as research focal points (Baca Zinn and Mirandè 2020). It is important to note that many of these courses were only offered once during this period and were not always taught by faculty in the department but instead by graduate students or part-time lecturers.

This is a similar pattern that continues to occur at the institution. Castorena recalls how the few elective courses that focused on race, such as “The Dynamics of Prejudice,” were taught by graduate students like Dr. Castillo who centered texts by scholars of color. However, this pedagogical approach to the course disappeared upon Dr. Castillo’s graduation. Similarly, the Sociology of Mexican Americans disappeared after the retirement of the sole Chicano ever to receive tenure in the department. Not all classes follow this pattern, especially not degree-required courses. These courses were predominantly taught by white instructors and did not often include a deep analysis of race. It is also important to note that classes that appear to be inclusive and diverse based on the course name or description may also be misleading, especially in the history department. The department had courses such as “History of Latin America” and “Mexico to 1821,” as early as 1889, but researchers have identified that the history curriculum often focused on dominant perspectives (Moore 1973). While courses were offered that appeared inclusive, they were usually taught using dominant Western narratives that continued to silence and de-center Hispanic voices and Latine experiences.

Reflecting on these experiences and the data collected shows that the university lacks progress, especially in hiring more faculty and staff of color and ensuring that course curriculums include more than just Western perspectives. Doing so would ensure that the student population, many of whom come from diverse backgrounds, graduate from the university feeling supported and with knowledge that allows them to critique dominant ideologies. Ironically, funding for more faculty hires of color is not even afforded to the Chicana/o Studies department that the President lauded as “the envy of the nation”. As of this printing, only two hiring lines have been given to the department in the past ten years, despite the department asking for a hiring line each fiscal year to support growing student needs.

3.3. Precarious Funding and Support of Hispanic-Serving Spaces

Programming and resources for Latine students at the University rarely move beyond “saddlebag” initiatives, or initiatives where needs are met through added auxiliary services rather than true integration and infrastructural inclusion of the needs of the Hispanic population on campus (Ibarra 2000). These programs include nationally subsidized programs such as Upward Bound, Engaging Latino Communities for Education (ENLACE), and several others housed in the LEC, which all provide the financial, emotional, and academic support necessary to retain Latine students at the institution. Latine students rely heavily on these auxiliary programs to meet their unique needs. However, these programs are often excluded from system-wide resource allocation despite Hispanics comprising almost fifty percent of the student population. As a result, none of these programs are guaranteed since they all rely on federal grants, state legislated educational funds, allocations from student government, and too commonly, direct fundraising by the participating students themselves.

A prime example of the precariousness of grant-supported programs is the recent closure of Upward Bound after program managers failed to secure federal funding for their work to continue. Upward Bound (UB), a program created to prepare pre-college students to help increase their chances of college retention, does not exclusively serve Latine students, but because of the demographic landscape of the city, most UB participants are underserved Latine students. The website still appears on the university’s server with the disheartening text:

It is with a heavy heart that we must inform you that the… Upward Bound program will not continue after 31 August 2022. As many of you know, our program is grant-funded—which means that every 5 years, we must reapply for funding from the federal government. Unfortunately, our program was not selected for refunding in the most recent TRIO Grant Award Cycle and therefore is unable to continue its services.

(Upward Bound Website).

Because of the cyclical nature of grants, the institution will not be eligible to apply for UB funds until this grant cycle ends in 2027. While UB is a federally funded program outside of the institution’s financial purview, we include this program because it is one of just a few resources available for Latine/Hispanic students. As recently as 2021, 17 percent of Hispanic-identifying students were pushed out of the institution (2022). Programs like UB are designed to curtail this type of student attrition and increase retention likelihood. However, the university has not offered any alternative funds or programmatic options to fill the gap left by UB’s absence.

Similarly, all the initiatives housed at the LEC must appeal for funding yearly from the student government or have students and staff attend state legislative sessions to testify in hopes of securing funding. The Research Fellowship (TRF), a program designed to prepare first-generation, working-class, mostly Latine students to conduct graduate-level research, and which provides a graduate school experiential learning trip, boasts one of the highest rates of success amongst extracurricular academic programs. As of fall 2020, 96 percent of TRF participants had graduated or were making steady progress towards graduation and most of its participants went on to complete graduate school (Castillo et al. 2023, p. 4). Because of its student’s academic success, TRF is often lauded by university administration as a key example of “how the university serves Hispanic students.” However, each year that the program has been active, the program director and graduate research fellows strategize ways to raise the outstanding money necessary for its success.

Former and current TRF students testify to the University’s Student Fee Review Board each fall and plead for them to continue to fund center programming. Similarly, the program director writes proposals each year and goes institutional “door-knocking” amongst campus departments that have a vested interest in the success of this program (usually because of the ethnic, racial, or disciplinary makeup of the students involved). Donated or pledged money frequently comes from surplus budgets and is therefore contingent upon the discretionary spending of each department.

There has not yet been a year where students themselves did not take up the burden to fundraise the outstanding need. This is usually done through raffle tickets, chocolate sales, or partnerships with restaurants where students encourage friends to patronize the business in exchange for a percentage of the profits. TRF is an intensive program where students are already asked to give up biweekly Fridays and a few Saturdays per semester for intensive academic workshops. Most scholars juggle the program, a full course load, membership in extracurricular organizations, and jobs. They then assume the added responsibility of fundraising so the program can be successful, because the Hispanic-enrolling university’s performative celebration of the program does translate to financial prioritization of this program or the ethnic center that houses it.

TRF is only one of many resources that the LEC provides to the student body. It also gives need-based scholarships to students on a rolling basis, and this money is commonly used to pay for housing, food, or basic needs. However, there is only a limited number of funds each fiscal year and the need usually outweighs the resources. It also houses academic programs that provide graduate students with professional development that they may otherwise not receive in their programs (Graduate Student Academia) and provides culturally centered mentoring for new undergraduate students (Transformational Mentorship Program) among others. Further, it is the home of the federally funded College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP), which recruits, serves, and provides wraparound support for migrant and seasonal worker students. The largest percentage of LEC’s budget goes towards the Latine Graduation (renamed the Latine Stoling Ceremony due to Trump’s DEI executive orders), the bilingual ceremony discussed in the introduction. It has grown exponentially each year, and for the past few years it has been so large it is now housed in the same venue as the University’s general graduation ceremony. Some graduates even opt out of the general graduation and only participate in this culturally relevant ceremony which many of their Spanish-speaking parents and family can understand.

While LEC’s work is transformative and centers the cultural needs of Latine students on campus, ethnic centers and supplementary saddlebag programs alone cannot be the only spaces that support Hispanic students at the university, particularly when the university benefits from HSI designation funding. Saddlebag programs were created to address minoritized students’ needs, but in their creation, universities also failed to change their infrastructure with intentionality so that saddlebag initiatives could be embedded in the fiber of the institution (Ibarra 2000, p. 240). Other pockets of support that provide crucial services and community for Latine students exist on campus. One such space is the underfunded Chicana/Chicano Studies department and its beloved Casita—a contested space that the institution has threatened to demolish and that has been temporarily saved through the combined organizing efforts of faculty, staff, students, and community. Its existence is still precarious, and these spaces are treated as afterthoughts because the mission of the university does not reflect a vested responsibility to its Hispanic population. The mission statement reads:

As the state’s premier institution of higher learning and provider of health care, [the University] promotes discovery, generates intellectual and cultural contributions, honors academic values, and fosters an educated, healthy, and economically vigorous [state]

(Anonymous 2001).

This mission, as is the case with most HSIs, fails to address its HSI designation, a problematic omission from a statement that signals the philosophical values and priorities of the institution to the world (Garcia 2023, pp. 37–38).

4. Discussion

Policy Implications and Recommendations

When discussing transformation, we imagine intersectional possibilities for inquiry and praxis (continuous action/reflection)—everything that could exist to recruit, retain, enrich, and celebrate Latine students. We embark upon “freedom dreaming”—that is, we articulate “hopes and goals” to create a foundation for an “organization that does not yet exist” (Garcia 2023, p. 9). While some may see this as unattainable, we counter with a question: what good is dreaming of a transformative and socially just future if we are not willing to dream of revolutionary changes that will fundamentally transform the university into an equitable and just institution? This means that those of us toiling in resource-starved institutions cannot simply wait for the money before we act. Instead, we must cultivate what Morris (2017) calls “liberation capital”—cultivating networks of scholars, teachers, staff, students, communities in resource-starved institutions that are committed to collaborative and liberatory work to advance equity and justice in higher education and beyond. This is also a call to challenge the status quo in racialized organizations that continue to reproduce unequal power, limit the agency of marginalized groups, credential whiteness as a possessive investment in the status quo, and decouple their stated goals about serving students and practices that penalize marginalize students through performativity and little action (Ray 2019). For example, when universities claim that they are proud to have a high number of students who are first-generation college by giving out t-shirts, but do nothing to increase funding for programs that serve these students, they have decoupled their stated aims from their allocation of resources. When institutions claim that they have improved undergraduate graduation but do not include intersectional analysis of how many were Latine men who grew up in a household where no parent earned a college degree when that student was 16, as compared to their continuing college-generation counterparts, etc., regardless of intention, they have contributed to the obfuscation of complex inequalities. We must do better. We must embrace intersectionality as critical inquiry and praxis as an ethical commitment to student success and community accountability (Collins and Bilge 2020).

Freedom dreaming can be accomplished, and there is evidence of it at different institutions, including one of the university’s satellite campuses. Each satellite campus has received HSI designation; however, support and funding of Latine students at satellite campuses tend to be more holistic and intentional. As of 2023, one satellite campus was one of six campuses across the nation to be featured in Excelencia in Education’s report about moving beyond designation and implementing strategic practices to support its students (Arroyo and Santiago 2023). This campus has committed to becoming a data-informed, evidence-based, culturally relevant, and culturally informed college campus (Gerdes 2023). Through this model, it becomes a space where Latine students can “fly” instead of being “scraped off the ground” of white academia (Martinez-Cola 2025, p. 9). A notable difference between the satellite and main campuses is that only the main campus holds R1 designation (American Council on Education 2025). This begs the question: Why are Latine-centered institutional changes and pedagogical approaches only practiced on a satellite campus without “very high research activity” designation?

Five practices we recommend for transformation are as follows:

• Intentional investment in recruiting and retaining Latine scholars, students, staff, and administrators committed to engaging and transformative impact. This can be accomplished through preferred criteria (e.g., demonstrated commitment to equity, inclusion and student success, as well as working with broadly diverse communities). Another facet could be the adoption of intersectionality as a normative principle for baseline data on student demographics, outcomes and benchmark data on faculty and staff hires that goes beyond compliance to confronting and eliminating intersectional inequities in outcomes, resources and practice. This could be institutionalized in public facing dashboards, institutional vision and mission statements as well as in budgets that allocate resources accordingly.
• Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Department Community-Care. Departments could include annual review and tenure and promotion criteria that include discussion of how instructors and the department leverage the cultural wealth of students. This could be done by providing courses that include place-based learning opportunities focused on the local community’s needs, internship opportunities, as well as community members as faculty with expertise that could be acknowledged through titles and recognition as professors of practice. Accountability structures could be incorporated in seven-year academic program reviews (self-studies and external review guidelines), as well as annual department- and unit-level retreats and review forms for faculty, staff and high-level administrators’ performance evaluations.
• Sustainable and liberatory fixed allocation of funds for Latine-focused Student Support and Empowerment. This could be creating dual enrolled courses that are open to both high school students and undergraduate students on Chicanx/Latinx Studies and intentional partnerships with TRIO programs, including the Upward Bound Program, that focuses on students growing up in a household where no parent/guardian earned a four-year college degree.
• Community Partnerships that Advocate for Latine community development and empowerment. This could take the form of internship credits for students interested in education, law and public health focused on the needs of Latine communities. It could also include the creation of pipelines for community members to become professors of practice and subject matter experts.
• Institutional memory and archives of activists’ struggles at the University across time as part of academic program self-studies and as ongoing coursework and research in social science and history classes and other departments. This could provide a valuable research experience for undergraduate and graduate students alike. See the ethnography of the university project at the University of Illinios-Urbana Champaign as one example of how to implement this project: http://www.eui.illinois.edu/.

We further recommend that the main campus leadership consult with the satellite campus to gain strategies for fundamental, transformative change of its flagship campus. The Excelencia in Education report in which the satellite campus is featured highlights key strategies that main campus could adopt to move beyond Hispanic-enrolling status to equitably serving Latine students (Arroyo and Santiago 2023). Finally, university administrators should apply the Transforming Hispanic-Serving Institutions Framework outlined by Garcia (2023, pp. 27–28). An immediate step to signal a shift in values to prioritize serving Hispanic students would be a revision of the University’s Mission Statement to include its HSI designation and language that illustrates a demonstrated commitment to the institution’s Hispanic population.

Our final recommendation derives from the institutional barriers we encountered throughout the course of this work. It is critically important that universities that are committed to transformative practices maintain an ongoing critical ethnography that centers the lived experiences of those at the margins. To this end, we recommend that universities commit to creating, funding, and maintaining a critical archive that preserves the oral histories, documents, curriculum, and pedagogical practices of historically marginalized groups. Further, for these efforts to go beyond performativity, this archive must be allowed to exist without institutional interference, gatekeeping, and surveillance. It must be a critically self-reflexive archive that records both the successes as well as the missteps taken vis-à-vis populations of color and include meaningful action steps, resources and accountability structures to repair the inequities.

5. Conclusions

We understand that the current political climate creates fear and uncertainty for university administration. As we write this chapter, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it will end discretionary funding to several minority-serving institutions’ grant programs. In addition, see the U.S. Solicitors General’s determination that the Hispanic-Serving Institution program “violate the equal protection component of the fifth amendment”. In effect, these decisions continue to defund programs that create what Ruth E. Zambrana (2019) calls “equity lifts” for underrepresented students. As diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have been targeted and systematically dismantled at universities across the country, we know that it can seem that this work is better suited for a time passed. However, even amid the political turmoil and the attacks on education, university administrators and leadership can choose the path they want to take. Some universities, such as Columbia, have chosen the path of fear and have crumbled to the demands of authoritarianism (Lim 2025). However, other institutions such as Harvard have chosen to resist, fight back and to uphold the values for which they stand (Garber 2025). In this historic moment, as universities choose which path they will take, it is critical that we continue to shed light on the inequities, performativity, and lack of transparency that already existed in the academy. While some private institutions have chosen to resist and others have opted to comply with federal priorities, state and local legislatures have the power to choose a different path that embodies an ethical commitment to liberation. Moreover, when this is all said and done, it is precisely these critiques that will allow us to create a future built upon a more solid foundation that fundamentally reshapes academic institutions in such a way that they cannot be as easily dismantled as we experience today.

Twenty years from now, how will we know that we have successfully transformed the University? How could freedom dreaming (Garcia 2023) show us a new way forward? This work should not be read as merely an indictment of the University; rather it is an appeal for institutional accountability and an ethical commitment to transformation as a call to action (Love 2019). It is a “call-in” (Harrison and Williams-Cumberbatch 2022) and a transformational blasphemy that names betrayals from a place of deep love instead of rejection (Hurtado 1996). As Garcia and Cuellar remind us, “It is critical to talk about, address, and disrupt these types of experiences as part of the process of enacting servingness” (2023). Through embracing critical reflexivity at the institutional levels as well as the data points and evidence provided, we outlined how the performative celebration of HSI designation has not translated to sustainable institutional changes that would increase Latine retention, completion, and success. Further, the data demonstrate a lack of commitment to increasing Latine faculty and administrative presence on campus, culturally centered curriculum and courses, or dedicated institutional funding to support campus spaces and wraparound services provided by centers like the Latine Ethnic Center and departments like Chicanx Studies. We provide recommendations for institutional changes based on empirical research and community-centered resources to which the University can commit if it is truly interested in moving past performativity to become a transformative and supportive institution for Hispanic, Latine, and Chicanx-identifying scholars of all ranks (Petrov and Garcia 2021).