book cover 2

Maria, Teresa. "2/Historical Perspectives On Latino Access to Higher Education." The  Majority in the Minority: Expanding the Representation of Latina/o Faculty, Administrators, and Students in Higher Education. By Jeanett Castellanos, Lee Jones, and Victoria Maria MacDonald. Sterling, VA: Stylus Pub., 2003. Print.

This reading is about Latinos in Higher education and the issues that they encounter and have encountered in the past.  It not only shows the points of the students but also of the staff and faculty that work in this field. They even have graduate students, staff and faculty talk about their personal experiences as a Latino in Higher Education in order to have better insight into the issues that come with being a Latino.

Dr. Jeanett Castellanos s a professor in the University of California and she has her doctorate in Philosophy. Her specializations are “Latina/os students’ psychosociocultural college experiences, Racial ethnic minority persistence patterns and experiences in higher education, Cultural competence in higher education” (http://www.socsci.uci.edu/ssarc/castellj/webdocs/vita.pdf).

Dr. Lee Jones has a Doctorate in Organizational Development. He also “served as the Director for the Division of Multicultural Student Services and Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Washington State University”. (http://bureau.espeakers.com/gbsp/speaker.php?sid=8074) This experience has made him knowledgeable in the area of diversity in Higher Education.  These are just two of the people but all of the contributors show great potential and experience in the idea of diversity in Higher Education.

La Familia is a term that is defined as the family in the literal sense. But it’s more than just mom, dad, sister, brother in the family.  Families are considered a huge part of our lives and include aunts, uncles, cousins, godparents and grandparents. The second term described is la comunidad, the community. Families reach out to many different organizations; many Hispanic families are religious and take the advice of the community of the church. They also talk to the neighbors and they are all interconnected somehow. From personal experience, it always seemed like one Spanish family had ties to the next Spanish family and this is because we are very bent on having a tight knit community.

“We recommend that academic deans and other hiring agents engage in dialogue with senior Latina/o faculty to learn more about how they can nurture and retain us” (280) I believe this to be important because the faculty should try their best to keep the dropout rate for Hispanic Students low. In fact, they should work on keeping any of the dropout rates low and this is important to every group and culture for them to have a sense of belonging in the environment where they are expected to learn.

“A second issue raised by research about Hispanic faculty concerns their number in higher education (Aguirre, 2000; Arce, 1976; Garza, 1988; Haro, 1989; Milem & Astin, 1993; Olivas 1988) (244). This is another interesting point that relates to my topic or could. My topic focuses on Latinos in Higher Education but I feel this quote is interesting because it discusses the faculty perspective instead of a student perspective which is what I’m focusing on. But this is an interesting topic as well.

“The pioneers of the pre-1960 era demonstrated that Latino youth could succeed in college if they attained access” (27) I particularly enjoy this quote because it helps to start off the topic that Latinos can be successful if given the opportunity and it’s a good transitional sentence to start the history of early higher education for the Latino community.

This material helped me think of new ways to expand my topic by not only looking at just the student perspective but by also talking about the faculty and staff positions and how Latinos are doing in those fields. Are they succeeding? Are they getting a lot of jobs? And if not, what is holding them back? All good questions to think about. These ties into the other book cover I did because it also explicitly talks about the Latino community in college and how to help them succeed and become better students as well provide them with access to learn about the opportunities.