Crossing Latinidades helps students build community

A $5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow the University of Illinois Chicago-led initiative Crossing Latinidades to continue supporting faculty in Latinx humanities and graduate students in Latinx studies.

As part of the grant, two PhD students are chosen from UIC and other universities to receive a yearlong stipend and academic support to complete proposals for their dissertations.

The two UIC students chosen this year are Marina Alvarez, who is pursuing a PhD in art history, and Briana Salas, who is pursuing a doctorate in history.

Crossing Latinidades began in 2020, and the recent funding means it will continue until 2027 to enhance Latinx humanities studies and grow the pool of Latino doctoral students, who are underrepresented in proportion to their share of the U.S. population. 

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Alvarez and Salas took part in a summer institute in Latino humanities study methodologies and theories, where they received guidance from advisors, writing coaches and Latino humanities experts as they began work on their dissertation proposals.  

Salas is in her third year in the PhD program, where she hopes to earn her doctorate in history in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The institutional support available for Latino students was a major reason she chose UIC. She earned her master's degree at Texas Christian University. 

Salas' focus is on carceral history, which looks at policing and penal systems over time. She is planning to focus her dissertation on school resource officers in her hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, to better understand the school-to-prison pipeline. 

She said Crossing Latinidades has allowed her to be part of a network where she can learn from others, who may be both first-generation college students and graduate students, like she is. 

"My parents both got their bachelor's degrees when I was finishing high school," Salas said. "No one in my family has ever gotten a master's or a PhD, and I really didn't know how to follow these steps to become a professor or even what it looks like after a bachelor's degree in history." 

At UIC she has studied with Adam Goodman, an associate professor of Latin American and Latino studies and history whose focus is migration history. Salas also studied with Lilia Fernández, professor of Latin American and Latino studies and history whose focus is urban history. In addition, she has studied with Elizabeth Todd-Breland, associate professor of history at UIC who also serves on the Chicago Public Schools school board and voted to remove school resource officers from the school district. 

Salas said receiving the Crossing Latinidades fellowship will allow her to make her dissertation as exceptional as she can thanks to the writing workshops, she'll participate in throughout the year. She'll also be able to tap into a network of professionals when it comes time to look for tenured positions after she receives her doctorate.

"It seems doable now. Before it was like this huge thing - 'OK, write a book,'" Salas said of writing her dissertation. "It was daunting." 

Alvarez is in her third year of her PhD program in the art history department in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts. Her focus is 20th-century Mexican, Indigenous and Chicana/o art viewed through decolonial feminist theories. She has also published articles on the political potential of feminist graffiti on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Her dissertation expands on the work of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People's Graphic Workshop) prints produced during Mexico's post-revolutionary literacy campaigns for nationalized, rural education. 

A California native, Alvarez moved to Chicago to pursue her master's degree in Spanish language and literatures at Loyola University. From 2021-23, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Visual Arts Curatorial Assistant at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, and in 2019 she became a Latino Museum Studies Fellow through the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino. 

During the summer institute, students visited the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago and met with museum officials. 

Alvarez said Crossing Latinidades establishes a network of scholars she can learn from and connect with during her scholarly work. 

"Graduate school can be very isolating, so the fact that I am able to meet other scholars within the field of Latino studies and also get mentorship and build communities is something that is unheard of," Alvarez said. 

During the weeklong summer institute, she connected with scholars from the other Alliance of Hispanic Research Serving Universities schools that took part. She also worked with mentors and looks forward to continuing to do so as she completes her dissertation.  

Like Salas, she said having a network of other scholars who, like her, are first-generation college students was crucial to her success. 

"Without Crossing Latinidades, I don't think I would be able to do it," she said. "It would be more challenging if I didn't have these support systems."