HSI Literature Review

“Hispanic-Serving Institution” (HSI) is a federal designation for institutions of higher education that enroll at least 25% or more full-time equivalent enrollment of Latinx-identified students. They first received federal recognition in 1992 as a result of longstanding political advocacy and legislative battles led by Mexican American civil rights organizations (Valdez, 2015). Scholars of education have brought critical attention to the fact that beyond the 25% Latinx-identified student enrollment, HSI designation lacks federal specification for what “serving” means and how it may best be operationalized to meet the academic and social justice needs of Latinx students at these institutions (Garcia et al.).

SJSU became an HSI in AY 2014-2015, and currently has a Latinx student population of 30.4%, or just under 10,000 students (a 25% increase since Fall 2016). However, our campus did not have an explicit approach, model, or framework for how the university can and should serve Latinx students and communities; as is the case at many institutions, SJSU achieved HSI status due to enrollment trends rather than having dedicated programs and services in place to enable Latinx and other historically underserved students to thrive. In this mix, SJSU’s Chicanx/Latinx Student Success Center, known as “Centro,” was founded through an enduring process that was launched by the ¡Adelante! Chicanx/Latinx Student Success Task Force in Fall 2014. The task force was composed of faculty, staff, and students from across the university. ¡Adelante! piloted a workshop series on academic resilience, community events such as a fall welcome/resource fair and end-of-semester study nights, and an annual three-day Latinx student leadership retreat for groups of 40 students. The range of programming offered in this endeavor was largely through the volunteer efforts of faculty and staff supporters, which led to the Centro bring founded in 2018.

Faculty leaders at the Centro have been engaged in research on transformative approaches to engaging Latinx students for a number of years, building on extensive study of the existing research on the experiences of Latinx college students and collaboration with experts in this area of research. The insights from this body of work were applied to create a comprehensive approach to support Latinx students, building on their strengths and addressing their diverse needs at SJSU. This work is collaborative, inclusive of campus community members who have a genuine and sincere desire to work with students, staff, and faculty at the leading edge of developing and deploying ideas, projects, and practices of what it means to serve Chicanx and Latinx students. In addition to the SOMOS framework, those seeking to learn about HSI work and how to join ongoing efforts at SJSU can consult a growing body of research by our faculty leaders and other works that emphasizes the concept of “servingness,” of which we provide insight for a few below.  

Yosso, Tara J., and Rebeca Burciaga. “Reclaiming our histories, recovering community cultural wealth.” Center for Critical Race Studies at UCLA Research Brief 5 (2016): 1-4.

Yosso and Burciaga contend that Critical Race Theory is a “dynamic interdisciplinary framework” that can be used by faculty to register, examine, and contest the ways that race and racism unfavorably mark the lived chances of students of color. In this essay, they demonstrate that subordination is not absolute. Rather, it is challenged in society across different sites. Yosso and Burciaga go on to argue that the university campus is one such site. They demonstrate that the practice of identifying, affirming, and utilizing in classrooms the epistemologies that exist in communities of color can invite students to understand themselves as belonging to communities of knowledge producing subjects, as historical agents of not only academic achievement, but also of broader social justice. This approach contests deficit thinking, and offers faculty an important set of practices to recognize a whole range of social and cultural assets their students bring with them to campus from their communities.

Pizarro, Marcos, Janine Nkosi, and Alondra Rios-Cervantes. “Developing Chicanx Studies methods: Living racial justice with teachers, communities, and students.” Community-based participatory research: Testimonios from Chicana/o Studies (2019): 43-69.

Pizzaro, Nkosi, and Rios-Cervantes develop and deploy counter-storytelling as a tool of community-making and collective learning within what they call a “Living Racial Justice” model. They contend that this tool illuminates a Chicanx studies framework that acknowledges and learns from the lived experiences of marginalized communities, which are often overlooked by majoritarian narratives in society. The authors’ invite their readers to approach counter-storytelling as a collective process where connections built on trust are paramount. By using critical race theory and community cultural wealth frameworks to inform their process of counter-storytelling, they demonstrate how critical insight is produced by students and community members. The alternative learning environment they create through this process facilities a practice where students blend community with academic knowledge. This is a vital teaching and learning tool because it encourages people who are working to develop and practice HSI initiatives to recognize the value in illuminating the stories of students from historically marginalized communities.

Garcia, Gina A. “A love letter to HSI grant seekers/implementers and the federal agencies that fund them: Defining servingness in research, practice, & policy.” Journal of the Alliance for Hispanic Serving Institution Educators 1, no. 1 (2021): 1-14.

Gina A. Garcia’s love letter speaks to the need of identifying and understanding what she calls, “servingness” at HSI institutions. She holds that using a multidimensional conceptual framework of servingness can initiate important conversations about the intersections of research, policy, and practice, making intentional connections that can have positive and meaningful outcomes for Latinx students. Such a dynamic conversation better enables HSI stakeholders to identify the gaps between these axis that hinder the effectiveness of HSI initiatives. Garcia encourages us to think of “HSIs as spaces of liberation and justice” that foster “Latinx, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), low-income students, first generation students, undocumented students or students from mixed status families.” The indicators of what serving means in this piece seeks to manifest a notion of servingness that is not limited to the classroom and campus, but extends ideas of equity and inclusion outward to the very communities and neighborhoods where our students come from.

Rendón, Laura I. Sentipensante (sensing/thinking) pedagogy: Educating for wholeness, social justice and liberation. Stylus publishing, LLC, 2012.

Laura Rendón’s book offers educators a transformative vision of education that takes seriously the relationship between thinking and feeling in the pursuit of knowledge. Beginning with the argument that dominant ways of knowing and being in higher education have established dominant agreements that stripteachers and students of the opportunity to be their whole selves in spaces of higher learning, Rendón goes on to show how collective forms of learning can contest these agreements while simultaneously allowing educators and students to create new ones that speak to their needs and dreams. Sentipensante pedagogy serves as a framework for HSI practitioners to build respectful relationships with students, especially those who seek to foster conversations about social justice, equity, and belonging in their classrooms. Rendon encourages her readers to create their own “Dreamfields,” to imagine and engage in the collective development of new values and agreements that honor diverse subjectivities and recognize respectful relationships with others as key to learning.