Documenting the Transformative Experiences of Latinas at an HSI through a Chicana Feminist PAR Study

• In Event: Participatory Action Research Projects at Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Co-creating HSI-PAR to Foster Servingness and Community-Centered Transformation

Abstract

Background and Purpose
This paper is based on a qualitative longitudinal Chicana Feminist Participatory Action Research (CFPAR) study centered on an undergraduate Latina mentoring program at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in Texas (Author et al., 2020; 2021). The program was founded in 2016, and through the CFPAR design, a group of Latina faculty, staff, and students collected data with mentors and mentees in the program over four years. Although Latinas were the largest group of undergraduate students at the institution by race/ethnicity and gender at the time of the study, in 2023 the sociopolitical context changed amid the passage of harsh anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) state legislation–causing the mentoring program to discontinue after seven years. The purpose of this paper is to share how the student participants reflected on their engagement in the mentoring program and what their participation in the study meant to them.

Theoretical Framework, Methods, & Data
This study considered socio-cultural, political, and historical contexts (Gutiérrez, 2008) in exploring Latina undergraduate’s lives in their community, at home, and on an HSI campus. Chicana Feminist Epistemology (Author et al., 2020; 2021; Delgado Bernal, 1998; Hurtado, 2003) and PAR (Torre, 2009) guided the creation of a Latina research collective that allowed us to qualitatively examine the multiplicities of the Latina students, staff, and mentors in this program situated within one of the most diverse institutions in the country. This paper draws from 100 interviews that took place between 2017-2021 with three cohorts of Latina undergraduate student participants (N=25).

Findings
The establishment of this Latina mentoring program represented a transformative rupture (Delgado Bernal & Alemán, 2018) at the institution that fostered validation for Latinas on campus and disrupted barriers. Some themes that we identified were holistic support and changed aspirations. For example, August shared:
…not only would this [program] help grow culturally, but it would help to ease me into the process of being in college and reminding me that I’m not the only one who is struggling in being first generation. There’s other people who are going through it, too. So we can kind of go through it together.
Similarly, Elizabeth said, “It has allowed me to just experience talking to other people that have gone through the same things I’m going through.”

Some participants changed their aspirations because of what they saw Latina mentors doing. August shared during her second interview that she still wanted to be a teacher, but she also wanted to teach teachers, and even become a professor. Rose shared that the mentors in the program were, “there to guide you and also want to see your success too.”

Scholarly Significance and Implications
Aligned with research on HSI’s (Garcia, 2016) that critically examines what HSI servingness can and should look like, I argue that Latinas’ intersectionalities need to be recognized and prioritized by HSIs (Author, 2022; Garcia & Cuellar, 2023). I discuss the implications for institutional practices that could support Latinas as well as the potential of future PAR at HSI studies.

Author

• Ruth María López, University of Arizona