Does the University of Arizona Serve Only Hispanics?
Editors’ Note: We agree with the author that even determining who is “Hispanic” can be difficult. Moreover, it does not sound very inclusive. Are we at the point where Irish, German, and Jewish students are made to feel “marginalized” by such designations? Do they feel welcome and safe at the U of A? How much damage is done to them by making them feel they are outsiders? Besides, if we stay with the shibboleths of the Left long enough, we find we have a “Hispanic serving” institution on stolen land. The Spanish were colonizers. This alone should be enough to give a progressive a mental hernia.
If not, then why is it designated a Hispanic Serving Institution?
A recent Arizona Daily Star story was about the ranking of Arizona’s three state universities on the U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings—rankings which are seen as suspect in some quarters.
The story also said that the University of Arizona is a Hispanic Serving Institution. More on this strange characterization in a moment.
No Arizona university ranks in the top 100 on the U.S. News & World Report rankings, but the University of Arizona ranks slightly higher than Arizona State University, which in turn ranks higher than Northern Arizona University.
The story said that the U of A’s four-year graduation rate is only 51 percent. It did not say how many students end up deep in debt but never graduate, due to the tuition loan scam that universities benefit from and thus eagerly endorse.
The Wall Street Journal has a different ranking system, which puts a heavy weight on how well graduates do in their career after graduating and what return they get on their college investment. If memory serves, ASU ranks much higher than the U of A and NAU.
Let’s return now to the subject of the U of A being characterized as a Hispanic Serving Institution. That was a designation given to it by the federal government in 2018, due to the university having a significant Hispanic student population.
Naturally, there is money involved. Schools that get the designation are eligible for federal and nonprofit grants, for the stated purpose of helping Hispanics get into college, do well in college, and have their culture acknowledged.
It’s unclear what ethnocultural groups are considered to be Hispanic or how it is determined whether someone qualifies to be labeled as such.
If you think that this determination is easy, consider that 25 million Argentinians and 32 million Brazilians have Italian ancestry. Are they Italian, Hispanic, or Latino? For sure, a U of A student of Italian and Argentinian ancestry has little in common with a student of Mestizo ancestry from Sonoran, Mexico—other than their common humanity.
Also consider the history of how “Hispanic” and the other official racial/ethnic categories came to be in America. It’s a sordid history that has little to do with anthropology, sociology, genetics, or social justice, but a lot to do with identity politics, race hucksters, and a racial spoils system.
My son graduated from the U of A with two engineering degrees a decade ago, which was prior to the university becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution. Given his surname of Cantoni, the U of A probably didn’t classify him as Hispanic. Even though the U of A is not an Italian-serving institution, the degrees have served him well.
In any event, there was no chance of my son applying to an Italian-serving institution, because there aren’t any universities designated as such, except perhaps in Italy. There weren’t any even in the early twentieth century, when Italians were seen as non-White and just one step up from Blacks.
That was probably for the better. Italians have done very well without paternalism and pandering, albeit not as well as East Indians, who are at the top of the American income ladder.
My alma mater of St. Mary’s University, in San Antonio, Texas, wasn’t an official Hispanic Serving Institution, because the designation didn’t exist back then. But it had a very large Hispanic student body, or more specifically, a “Mexican” student body, which is how students of Mexican heritage referred to themselves back in the dark ages, before the government’s contrived racial/ethnic categories became widely adopted without question or discernment.
Due to working my way through college and living in the barrio while obtaining two degrees and an Army officer commission, my ROI was sky-high over my subsequent career. My Mexican classmates also went on to do very well without paternalism and pandering.
There were cultural differences between us, but my Mexican friends and I were similar in patriotism, especially those of us in ROTC. Many of us were also similar in having immigrant ancestors who faced poverty, discrimination and hardship when they came to the U.S. In my case, it was my grandparents who had immigrated. My Mexican classmates, on the other hand, were first-, second-, or third-generation; and some of them had ancestors who had lived in what is now the United States when it was part of Mexico. One friend was an exception: He was a Mexican national whose parents were wealthy industrialists in Monterrey.
Mexican and Italian immigrants were similar in still another respect: There was a large criminal element among them, a fact that resulted in the law-abiding being negatively stereotyped, or worse.
The “worse” for Italians included these three historical events:
In one of the biggest mass lynchings in American history, eleven Italians were hanged in New Orleans, in 1891.
On July 14, 1921, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, Italian immigrants and anarchists, were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. There was worldwide condemnation of the sentence due to what was seen as prosecutorial racism. The publicity and outrage rivaled the reaction to George Floyd’s death 100 years later.
The Immigration Act of 1924 was passed to stop the influx of undesirable immigrants, with Italians being the largest target. The act was the foundation of immigration policy for 30 years. Tellingly, many Americans know about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 but not about the 1924 act. That’s because it doesn’t fit today’s narrative about White privilege and colonialism for a racial/ethnic group that wasn’t seen as White in the past but is seen as White today to have been treated unjustly.
Italians continue to be fair game for movies and TV shows about mobsters. The “Godfather” movie trilogy and the “Sopranos” TV series are cases in point.
As with other European groups, Italians had nothing to do with the slave trade to North America, but they were castigated the same as the groups that prospered from the trade, namely the English and Dutch. At the same time, in a glaring double standard, Hispanics tend not to be castigated, although the Spanish and Portuguese and their colonies imported more slaves to Latin America than the English and Dutch did to N. America.
Another double standard is the University of Arizona being designated a Hispanic Serving Institution but not an Italian-serving one. No doubt, someone will offer a lame justification for this.
