LLS: Consciousness-Raising of the Latino/Communities Diversity

In Latinas/os everyday lives, their culture and their race are objectified and marginalized. Historically, this is represented in the assumption that Latin-American culture is ???Latino??? culture, when their experiences are in actuality quite different. This conflation led to the establishment of Latina/o Studies here at the University of Illinois. All our group members have been students in Latina/o Studies classes, and we have conducted interviews with people in these classes, observed these classes, and handed out surveys to try and discover the reasons behind students??? interest in Latina/o Studies classes. We also asked these students in our interviews about their experiences as Latinas/os in a predominantly white university, the stereotypes they face, and the extra challenges of being a minority student here. We have come to the conclusion that ethnographic research on the Latino Community is challenging and fruitful, although we have only begun to scratch the surface. There are so many aspects to being ???Latino??? that the array of possibilities cannot be fully determined. We have, however, discussed the challenges that Latinos face in terms of education, stereotypes as well as racisms.unpublishe

A "Safe Space" All Alone: The Transforming Essence of a Latina/o Cultural House

I have found that La Casa occupies a complicated position as it attempts to overcome the tensions within the Latina/o community, while also representing Latina/o interests to a historically apathetic and homogenizing University on issue of race. Both efforts have contributed to both a general attendance problem at La Casa, and to the relative failure of a new retention program that is the core of this thesis??? ethnographic analysis. I conducted nine interviews, observed five events associated with the new retention program that I will call ???I-achieve,??? and distributed surveys to get an idea of how La Casa participants understand its purpose, and to see who actually goes to La Casa events (namely how they define themselves ethnically, their major, and their year in school). The first chapter covers the history of La Casa in terms of these tensions in order to consider how I-Achieve???s failure is in part historically constituted. The second chapter examines the intense racial climate at the national level and at the local level that has caused factionalism in the Latina/o community here and marginalized La Casa. The final chapter examines this factionalism and the marginal position of La Casa in the words and actions of the students themselves. It is also shows that while La Casa does, in fact, offer a safe haven for incoming Latino/a students, it is only one of such spaces on campus.unpublishe

The Challenges of Developing Academic Programming by a Latino/a Cultural House

My research aims to find the answers to three questions: Who is La Casa for? What is the popular understanding of La Casa???s function? and How does that affect the success of a new retention program (I-achieve)? Past research by Ethnography of the University Students has suggested that the popular understanding of La Casa is not about improving personal performance in academic arenas, and that some people might feel excluded by La Casa and the larger Latino/a population on campus (Files, 2006; Garcia, 2006). I also found these mentioned by interviewees in my own research. The I-achieve program, being instituted by a group of new workers, hopes to increase Latino/a students??? social networks on campus and off, and to bring about self-improvement through goal setting and assessment workshops. This program, however, has had limited response, especially in the light of the approximately 2,000 Latino/a students enrolled at the U of I. I intend to investigate why this is the case through participant observation, interviewing, and surveying, testing my hypotheses along the way.unpublishe