The Chicanx and Latinx Studies Program is grounded in the decolonization and liberation projects of U.S. Latina/os and their allies in the civil rights, gender, and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s that continue through the present in new forms that address new conditions. Our courses on the U.S. Latina/o experience continue the historic mission of contributing to the production of truly universal knowledges about the United States and an increasingly interconnected world beyond the limited scope of Eurocentric or other ethnocentric perspectives and the disciplinary constraints in traditional fields of the humanities and social sciences. To achieve this we take seriously the knowledges, epistemologies and critical thinking produced by racially and sexually oppressed subjects, and we endeavor to examine the entangled intersectionality of racialized sexuality, gender, and class in complex socio-historical processes.
The Ethnic Studies Library is the departmental library of the Department of Ethnic Studies. It was established in 1997 by merging the Asian American Studies Library, the Chicano Studies Library, and the Native American Studies Library. Since the founding of the Department in 1969, the collections of these libraries grew from student interest in collecting and preserving a perspective by and for racialized communities that they saw as lacking or marginalized in other campus libraries. The specialized ethnic studies books and serials, archival collections, posters, and audio collections from those three libraries live on in a centralized space on the ground floor of Stephens Hall, a short walk from Barrows Hall. The library consists of these four collections: Asian American Studies Collection; Chicano Studies Collection; Native American Studies Collection; Comparative Ethnic Studies Collection. In addition to our collections, the ESL regularly hosts events, ESL librarians provide reference and instruction for the department and larger campus community, and takes recommendations on purchasing books in the field of Ethnic Studies.
