About the HSI mini grant series
Each year, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion awards a variety of high-impact mini grants to campus projects that support Latino students through targeted initiatives. Last year, the office distributed $35,000 across 17 projects. This story is one of 11 Mustang News features highlighting where and how those grants made an impact.
On May 5, the Department of Ethnic Studies hosted a symposium on Latinx and Indigenous identity co-sponsored by Cal Poly’s Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) grants and the College of Liberal Arts. It was composed of a pair of events: a talk on how indigenous Mexican migration affects the immigration debate and a workshop on Native languages.
The event was first proposed by MT Vallarte, an assistant professor of ethnic studies with interests in Phillipino studies, Asian American studies, queer and feminist theory, and poetry and poetics. They aimed to help students have a better understanding of indigenous identity.
“It was an amazing symposium that helped the Cal Poly community engage with identity beyond the United States and understand indigenous communities of Latin America, particularly the state of Oaxaca in Mexico,” Vallarte said.
Oaxacan identity was a major theme of Ramirez-Lopez’s talk.
She was chosen as the project lead for the Department of Ethnic Studies’ HSI mini-grant, which was used to sponsor two speakers to come to Cal Poly for her symposium. Vallarte invited Jorge Ramirez-Lopez, an assistant professor of global studies at UC Santa Barbara, and Inî Gabriel Mendoza, a Mixtec linguist, researcher and community organizer based out of Santa Maria.
Ramirez-Lopez writes about indigenous people from southern Mexico and global borders and is interested in the history of immigration into the United States from Mexico. At his talk, he wanted to educate people on the indigenous communities who have not had the chance to share their experiences.
“Within the Latino or Mexican population, one of the things you often see is that there is less information that is known about the indigenous people,” Ramirez-Lopez said. “When they come into the United States, they are often lumped together as Latino or as Mexicans, so you really don’t get an understanding of what their experiences are.”
He also highlighted the achievements of indigenous people, such as the 2015 Pacific Coast Farmworker Rebellion, where Mixtec and Triqui agricultural workers from Washington State to Baja California went on strike for better conditions. He highlighted how workers used their community relations to mobilize for better salaries and worker protections.
“They used the networks that they had to build an international movement in 2015 that stopped (agriculture) production for months, which gave them the chance to make their voices heard and enact actions,” Ramirez-Lopez said.
He felt his audience was quite engaged with what he said and was exposed to history they did not know before. Ramirez-Lopez found the event “exciting” and is grateful for the opportunity to have important discussions around indigenous people, many of whom work in agriculture.
“I find that it is just so important to have those conversations, that the people who are possibly producing the food we eat, the people who put food on our table, they are people with their own history, languages and experiences,” Ramirez-Lopez said.