Centering epistemologies on the margins and borders: reflections on an Hispanic-serving institution’s attempts to embrace equity and cultural wealth

Abstract

The U.S. Department of Education invites a university to be recognized as a Hispanicserving institution (HSI) if it is an institution of higher education that (a) is an eligible institution; and (b) has an enrollment of undergraduate full-time equivalent students that is at least 25 percent Hispanic students at the end of the award year immediately preceding the date of application (U.S. Department of Education, 2019). As of 2018, there are over 4,000 U.S. degree granting postsecondary institutions (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2019) and over 500 of them meet the federal enrollment criterion to be categorized as an HSI (Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, 2019). All in all, HSIs are roughly 15% of the nonprofit colleges and universities in our nation. To date, whites are three-fifths of the overall U.S. population and are declining in proportion to people of color. Currently, Latinxs are 18% of the total population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019), and that percentage is projected to increase with the next census count. Correlatively, then, the shift of predominantly white institutions (PWIs) into HSIs is connected to the shift of U.S. demographics. As such, an understanding of HSIs requires an understanding of Latinxs. Despite the increasingly large role HSIs play in U.S. higher education, the field of communication and instruction have not addressed HSIs as a unique area of investigation. I understand and articulate the lack of HSI-specific research as being sourced from the same white-privileging institutional barriers that continue to prevent the valuing and citation of communication scholarship by and about Latinx people. The communication field has often and significantly been implicated in its own research biases. From antiwomen publication patterns (Blair, Brown, & Baxter, 1994) to incomplete Asian positional research offerings (Ono & Nakayama, 2004) to a lack of diversity-focused research in instructional communication (Hendrix, Mazer, & Hess, 2016) to the overemphasis on white-produced and white-focused published research (Chakravartty, Kuo, Grubbs, & McIlwain, 2018), our discipline periodically documents and then redocuments how impartial we are to intellectual work that does not uphold the white male status quo.