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About the authors
Antonia Darder, a Puerto Rican scholar, is professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her work centers on critical educational theory, comparative studies of class and racialized inequality, and Latino Studies. She is the co-editor of Latinos and Education (Routledge) and The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy and Society (Blackwell). She is the author of the nationally acclaimed book, Culture and Power in the Classroom (Bergin and Garvey). Her new book, Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love (Routledge), was recognized as one of the outstanding books in curriculum for the year 2002 by the American Educational Research Association. Currently, she is an associate editor of Latino Studies and on the editorial board of New Political Science. In addition to her academic life, Darder is a published poet and visual artist.
Rodolfo D. Torres teaches urban political economy, Chicano/Latino Studies, and critical policy studies and is a member of the Focused Research Program in Labor Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has written and edited seven books, among them, Latino Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Latino Metropolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), Latino Social Movements (Routledge, 1999), and Race, Identity, and Citizenship (Blackwell, 1999). He is currently Associate Editor of New Political Science (Carfax, UK) and on the Editorial Board of Ethnicities (Sage, UK).
"When you say "America" you refer to the territory stretching between the icecaps of the two poles. So to hell with your barriers and frontier guards! (Diego Rivera)1"
The conservative climate befalling universities across the United States raises serious concerns for the future of Latino Studies. This is particularly true where university discourse, victim to its own political retrenchment, wrongly concludes that questions of culture, race, diversity and multiculturalism were sufficiently attended to in the post-civil rights era. Correspondingly, as the multicultural or diversity rhetoric wanes in the market place of ideas, raising dollars emerges as the top priority for universities nationwide--a feat accomplished primarily by adjusting faculty scholarship and research agendas to coincide with the priorities and mandates of the corporate world. In the main, many academic departments and university policy centers or "think tanks" almost entirely dependent on corporate monies, advance research priorities and policy...