Sending you all good wishes in this beautiful Wisconsin spring!
Our spring graduation ceremony has buoyed our spirits! Watching nearly 100 students walk across the stage to receive their degrees and certificates in Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies (24 majors, 61 certificates) while hundreds of family and friends cheered them on from the audience represents the culmination of years of hard work and hope, not only for our students but for everyone who has contributed to building our program over the past fifty years. Congratulations to all on this accomplishment!
This fall we will be celebrating our cincuentañera or 50th Anniversary on October 16 and October 17! We invite you to join us for a weekend of remembering, celebrating, reminiscing, reconnecting, and organizing for the future. We hope that you will attend to share with us, and the campus, stories of your many successes and the ways that Chicanx/e and Latinx/e studies has mattered to you. We welcome the opportunity to organize and plan with you for the future of our program and our communities in these challenging times.
The 25-26 academic year brought wonderful advances and ongoing challenges. On the wonderful side, five new faculty in Latinx studies joined UW-Madison departments this year: Francesca Lopez in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, Micha Espinosa in Directing, Theatre and Drama, Diana Leon-Boys in Communication Arts, Ana Oaxaca in Political Science, and Leah Durán in Curriculum and Instruction. Every single one of these hires has an outstanding record of research and teaching in Latinx Studies. We are lucky that they have chosen to join with us as Program Faculty in Chicanx/e and Latinx/e Studies. On the challenging side, we wrestled with the UW System implementation of Act 15 with respect to ethnic studies in the curriculum. After much discussion and organizing in cooperation with our peers in ethnic studies and in multiple departments—and messages from many of you—we succeeded in retaining ethnic studies in our curriculum at UW Madison.
Our students and campus community benefitted from another very successful year for our Speaker Series (read more in this issue) which over 350 people to four different events. Our colleagues launched a very successful first year of the Puerto Rican Studies Hub at UW-Madison (read more in this issue). We took students on an enriching special field trip this spring (read more in this issue). We continued work on our 50th Anniversary history exhibit, which will debut this fall. And we continued the work of studying, learning, researching, writing and expanding knowledge in Latinx studies (see the student journal and faculty updates). Thank you for your support in making this possible. Looking forward to seeing you in the fall.
Sincerely,
Theresa Delgadillo