CONSTITUTION
1. Who we are.
“the Latinx, Latin American, Caribbean, Latin Americanist, and Caribbeanist graduate student community of UMD”
“We are a collective of graduate students from Latin America and the Caribbean. We are Latinx. We are Latin Americanist scholars with divergent paths, personal trajectories, educational backgrounds, and research interests. We strive for inclusivity without losing the specificity that differentiates our approaches, ideologies, and preserves our histories. We seek to make connections between the Arts and Humanities, the Social Sciences, and STEM. We continually negotiate a cohesive identity without restricting the multiple identities, geographies, and epistemologies that guide LASC’s research and teaching agenda.”
“We are more than researchers. We are writers, communicators and, scholars engaged with activism and artivism.”
“We believe that is our role as Latin Americanists and Caribbeanists to dismantle the structures of colonialism and imperialism that characterize the process of knowledge making. We study and incorporate in our research different types of knowledge produced by indigenous people, black communities, Afro-Latinxs, women of color, and LGBTQ+ communities.”
2. What we do.
“We strive to create a space that provides a sanctuary for many students in a campus where they feel unsafe, to provide a pluralistic space to discuss pressing issues in a political context where Latin American immigrants and Latinx suffer the dissemination of racist discourses and gendered violence. We strive to create a safe space to express our multiple subjectivities and identities, a refuge where we can speak in our native languages, and enjoy our cultural commonalities and differences through food, drink, dance, and music.”
“The LASC writing group meets regularly to 1) create a space for discussion and intellectual exchange where students can share and construct knowledge that reaches across disciplines and experiences, 2) to explore interdisciplinary approaches in our research, 3) to facilitate a more holistic approach to professional development by engaging students with topics, research, questions, theories, and methodologies that are outside our fields, and 4) to generate a collaborative network among graduate students to share materials, sources, scholarship, and contacts that contribute to our research and experiences.”
“We teach about, research, and embrace the experiences of resistance and resilience of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx communities. We debate together the relationship between theory and practice, and how we should read, research, and conceptualize Latin America and the Caribbean in a U.S. institution.”
3. How we do it.
“We believe that everyday relationships and the way we engage with other people, disciplines, stories, and ways of living are central to advocating for communities historically marginalized in the country and systematically ignored on campus.”
“The main principles that guide our praxis are collective work and horizontalism. We embrace this practice in the planning of the conference, in the organizing of an event, and in our writing group. Collective work means challenging individualism and neoliberal practices. It means to consensuar projects and to extensively debate the goals of the events we organize, the speakers we invite, the type of space we want to create. Horizontalism requires time, energy, and a profound belief that any collective decision and collective action will have a better result than your own idea. It means that sometimes we need to trust in other people’s ideas and be patient waiting for the results. It means that we need to be ready to fail if necessary in order to take risks. It means that we need to meet more often to discuss ‘what worked well and what didn’t work well’ and ‘How can we improve next time?’”
4. Non-Discrimination Clause and UMD policies
The LASC Graduate Collective does not restrict membership or discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, age, national origin, political affiliation, physical or mental disability, religion, protected veteran status, genetic information, personal appearance, or on the basis of rights secured by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. (For definitions of “personal appearance” and “sexual orientation,” see the University’s Code of Human Relations.
The LASC Graduate Collective understands and is committed to fulfilling its responsibilities of abiding by University of Maryland, College Park policies.
Date of review of Constitution: 30 September 2020