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Dr. Pedro Caban is Professor and Director of the Latina and Latino Studies Program and Professor of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1898-1932. (Westview Press, 1999). He is currently writing a study of Puerto Rico and the American Century. Professor Caban is a Senior Editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. His recent and forthcoming publications on US - Puerto Rico relations and Latinos appear in Latino/a Research Review, Discourses, Caribbean Studies and in Anna Sampaio et al. (editors), Transnational Latino/a Communities: Re-examining Politics, Processes and Culture. Professor Caban is President of the Puerto Rican Studies Association (2002-2004) and served on the editorial board of Latin American Research Review.
Latino Studies has evolved from its insurrectionary and somewhat turbulent origins as Chicano and Puerto Rican Studies into its current incarnation as a multidisciplinary academic field that explores the diversity of localized and transnational experiences of Latin American and Caribbean national origin populations in the United States. In this essay, I draw a distinction between Latino Studies as a field of study and Latino Studies as an academic unit of instruction and research in the university. It is evident that as an academic field Latino Studies has matured in terms of the quantity and quality of the scholarship produced, the numbers of programs of instruction, the formation of professional associations, the publication of specialized journals, the growing numbers of doctorates minted each year in Latino and Latina-related subject matter, and other achievements. In the process the field has attained increased academic legitimacy and more universities have targeted hires specifically in Latino Studies.
The development of Latino Studies as academic units has not fared as favorably. As is the case with most race and ethnic studies, Latino Studies has a contested, and in some cases still undefined, status in the academy. The academy's response to Latino Studies has varied widely. As a consequence, Latino/a Studies academic units are configured in a multitude of forms. Hundreds of programs, departments, centers, and institutes have been established in the last three decades. Some academic units enjoy autonomy in hiring...