Highlander
Latino – Archive /The Highlander
Latinos make up 38.3% of UCR’s population, making it the largest ethnic group at UCR with nearly 10,000 students and positioning it as one of the most diverse universities in the country.
Chicanos in the Inland Empire have participated in a decades-long struggle to recruit students to UCR and to build up Latin American Studies, says Alfonso Gonzales Toribio, an associate professor in UCR’s Department of Ethnic Studies and the chair of the new Latino and Latin American Research Center.
Funded by a $2.9-million-dollar grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the UC Riverside Latino and Latin American Studies Research Center seeks to advance an emergent hemispheric approach to understanding both Latinos in the United States and people and processes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Based in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, the goal of the center is to establish UCR as a leader in the hemispheric debates