Adopted by the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, 11/14/23
The Department of HLL is committed to confronting all forms of racism, discrimination, and bias driven by ideologies of misogyny, ableism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. As a language and culture department, multilingualism rests at the core of our mission. As members of racialized and diasporic communities, we value, welcome, and celebrate people of any race, class, gender, ethnicity, disability status, sexual orientation, cultural upbringing, citizenship status, religion affiliation, education level, language affiliation, and socioeconomic status. We understand diversity as a force of renewal and change, and embrace academic, pedagogic, and intellectual ways of supporting those who have been historically marginalized. The Department of HLL strives to foster an inclusive community by hiring, retaining, and elevating the lived experiences and knowledge of people from underrepresented groups. By teaching, studying, and researching, we aim to learn about the processes of social transformation, and to dismantle the legacies of imperial expansion, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. By establishing long-lasting connections with Latinx communities across our region, we are guided by cultural humility and interdisciplinarity to renew our curricula, plans of study, and policies to awaken new languages, methods, and practices that sustain social change.
Aware of the uneven realities we live in, we stand in solidarity with the political struggles of Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and other marginalized populations in the United States and across the globe, against all forms of racism, white supremacy, and injustice. We acknowledge that the origins of our field are fraught with power imbalances, and injustices, like colonization and racialization. We recognize the unfair marginalization of immigrant communities and strive to become a space that values the cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity of Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas across the U.S.