Allan Hancock College announced a new Latino studies associate degree program on May 1 that will debut in the college’s summer and fall class offerings, with general registration beginning on May 9.
While summer classes will be conducted remotely due to COVID-19 related closures, Public Information Officer Christopher McGuinness told the Sun that students’ ability to take the program’s classes will not be affected. The program is the brainchild of Hancock professor Dr. Marc García-Martínez, who told the Sun that his idea to create a Latino studies program at the college was inspired by his father.
“My father was instrumental in starting a Chicano Studies Program at Moorpark College back around 1969 to 1972,” García-Martínez said. “I already grew up with that awareness and a lot of that activism.”
García-Martínez first started teaching at Hancock in 1997 and became a professor in 2001. He said it was during his faculty sabbatical about five years ago that he first began to mull over the idea of a Latino studies program for Hancock.
“I realized that there was a deficit curricula at Hancock College,” García-Martínez said. “Though we’ve been a federally recognized and federally funded Hispanic Serving Institution with a majority Latino student population, there was a deficit curricula within it, and I wanted to fill that curriculum.”
Over the next few years, García-Martínez researched other programs and read extensively about ethnic studies to prepare to create the new degree option. Then, last December, it all became official when the college’s board of trustees voted the program in unanimously.
The program is interdisciplinary, combining already existent courses from the college’s history, sociology, Spanish, anthropology, art, dance, English, and film departments.
“There’s a lot of data that links cultural studies pedagogy to higher student attendance, higher GPA,” García-Martínez said. For Latino students specifically, García-Martínez said studies link academic improvement to seeing that one’s “cultural experiences are reflected in the curricula.”
“At the end of it, I’m hoping that they can intellectually confront a lot of the issues that we’re seeing with respect to race, culture, and history to really develop a pride in being Latina or Latino,” he said.
While the timing for the program launch is unfortunate given Hancock’s summer classes being conducted online, García-Martínez believes that the circumstances the world is facing right now make learning more important than ever.
“Sometimes education is put on the back burner for these more intense kinds of realities. But in a lot of ways, this is even more of a reason to immerse ourselves in education,” García-Martínez said. “We realize just how unstable things can be, and a college education is one of the great equalizers, one of the great stabilizers. It strengthens our intellect, our heart, our creativity. I’m hoping that our students can look at it in that practical and ideal way.”
Public Information Officer McGuinness said that the college’s plans for fall, regarding remote versus in-person learning, are still being decided.
“We are currently in the middle of planning our fall term, and we will be releasing additional information on that in the future,” he said. “We are still going to have a fall semester.”
This article appears in May 7-14, 2020.
