Though 92% of California's community colleges are federally recognized Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs), Hispanic/Latinx students have disproportionately low success rates statewide. HSIs have been slow to center their Latinx students, opting instead for race-neutral policies and practices. Such approaches prevent educators from addressing the…

Student debt has exploded over the past several decades, rising to over $1.7 trillion. Federal student loans represent over 90% of student loan balances, with private financing making up the remainder. Research has shown that the negative impact of student debt has not been distributed equally across different demographics, with Black borrowers…

In this article, I discuss conceptual and methodological considerations for the design and implementation of Critical Race Feminista Participatory Action Research (Critical Race Feminista-PAR) projects in higher education. I share some theoretical considerations of Critical Race Feminista praxis and methodologies that have been made by scholars…

In this autoethnography, María Cioè-Peña recounts her experiences of Black erasure in bilingual education in US schools, where the focus is on language and an imagined mixed-race collective, centering culture to circumvent race and treating language as connective yet racially neutral. But languages and how language users are perceived are not…

The present study examined the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender in 22 bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 13;5 years; Med=9;4 years; STD=2.3) who were born and raised in the United States and acquired Spanish as heritage speakers--that is, they learned Spanish, the minority language, in a home setting (Valdes, 2001). Each of the child…

Regular physical activity and balanced nutrition are important in maintaining a healthy weight. Nonetheless, minority populations, like Hispanics, face challenges (e.g., language barriers and transportation unavailability) that limit their participation in intervention programs to receive benefits. Furthermore, dog companionship has been shown to…

The past two decades have seen a rapid increase in neuroscientific evidence being used to characterize how contextual, structural, and societal factors shape cognition and school readiness. Measures of functional brain activity are increasingly viewed as markers of child development and biomarkers that could be employed to track the impact of…

Freedom dreaming offers a new paradigm that centers the experiences and realities of Latinx students on college and university campuses and re-imagines residence halls as liberatory spaces. Referencing the legacy of racism and the experiences that Latinx students have with microaggressions and other forms of oppression, this article highlights how…

Guided by Chicana Feminist Epistemology, the authors of this study discuss the experiences of 16 Latina faculty and staff who served as mentors in a Latina undergraduate mentoring program at a research-extensive public university designated as a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI). This article focuses on findings from interviews as mentors made…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to describe how the language diversity (i.e., the within-group variability in dual-language skills) of Latino dual-language learner (DLL) preschoolers was related to their science readiness skills and (b) to describe the importance of language of science instruction for Spanish-dominant children.…

This study examined the connection between adolescent employment and future participation in postsecondary education in a sample of U.S. Latino high school juniors/seniors (n = 2164) from the 1992-2002 Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study. Employed and non-employed Latino adolescents did not markedly differ in academic performance, ability,…

In 2015-2016, the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina, featured "¡Nuevolution! Latinx and the New South," an interactive exhibit that explored the bidirectional ways Latinx and the US South influence one another. To strengthen the exhibit's impact, LMNS launched a dialogue program aimed at enhancing attendees'…

Although increasing numbers of teachers of color are entering the teacher pipeline, they continue to be in high demand, but short supply. Research shows teachers of color have lower pass rates on certification exams, a single factor that functions as a gatekeeper to teacher licensure. This study explores the impact of a science methods…

English Learners (ELs), students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, are a fast-growing, understudied, group of students in the U.S. with unique learning challenges. Cognitive flexibility--the ability to switch between task demands with ease--may be an important factor in learning for ELs as they have to manage learning in their non-dominant…

Latinx students enroll in higher education in more significant numbers than most minorities. However, Latinx administrators in the United States comprised 14% of total administrators in 2021 (Zippia, 2023b). The Association of American Colleges & Universities (Dedman, 2019) explains the college presidency is 58.1% White and male. White women…