UT Austin’s Elimination of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is a Betrayal of Texas
By Alfonso Ayala III, Doctoral Student, Mexican American & Latina/o Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
The Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies will no longer stand as an independent department at the University of Texas at Austin.
Many of you have now heard the deeply unsettling announcement from President Jim Davis that the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies will no longer stand as an independent department. Instead, it will be folded into a newly-created Department of Social and Cultural Analysis within the College of Liberal Arts, alongside African and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Let’s call this what it is. When The University of Texas at Austin dissolves the independent status of its Mexican American and Latina/o Studies (MALS) Department under the banner of “reorganization,” it is not administrative housekeeping. It is not streamlining. It is not “efficiency.” It is the reinscription of an already White, Eurocentric intellectual hierarchy that has long determined which knowledges are foundational and which are expendable. Stripping the department of its autonomy recenters power in traditional disciplinary structures historically shaped by Anglo-European canons and governance norms. That is not neutral restructuring. It is the restoration of hegemonic order dressed up as reform.
And in Texas of all places.
Texas is nearly 40 percent Latino. In our public schools, Latino children are the majority. In many districts, they are the future of the workforce, the electorate, and the civic life of this state. To dismantle a department devoted to the rigorous study of Mexican American and Latina/o histories, literatures, politics, and lived realities in a state demographically defined by those communities is not simply shortsighted. It is disproportionate, irresponsible, and frankly indefensible.
This is not about “identity politics.” It is about knowledge. It is about acknowledging that to be successful in any field in Texas requires an understanding of the Latino population. It is about understanding that Mexican American and Latina/o Studies doesn’t just study Latinos; it creates new ways of knowing and understanding Latinos. It is about whether a flagship public university has the intellectual courage to study the people who built and continue to build this state.
A public university has a public mission. That mission is not to sanitize knowledge to appease political pressure. It is to cultivate understanding, inquiry, and democratic capacity.
Eliminating Mexican American and Latina/o Studies in Texas is like shutting down marine science in Galveston.
Eliminating Mexican American and Latina/o Studies in Texas is like shutting down marine science in Galveston, agricultural research at Texas A&M, or energy studies in Houston — it is the willful abandonment of scholarship about the forces that define the state and shape its future. It is nothing short of institutionalized racism.
It is an abdication of relevance. It signals that the intellectual study of the largest ethnic population in the state is somehow optional—an expendable add-on rather than foundational scholarship. How offensive.
What does it say to Latino students—many of them first-generation college students—that their histories and ways of knowing, being, and doing in the world are too controversial to sustain? What does it say to faculty whose scholarship interrogates conquest, segregation, labor exploitation, bilingual education, and racial formation in this region? It says: your knowledge can exist, but only at the margins — never with the authority or autonomy afforded to dominant traditions.
And what does it say, that the decision to close the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is happening alongside the creation of programs like The School of Civic Leadership, The Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization, and majors in Strategy and Statecraft and Great Books?
This isn’t about efficiency or saving money or reducing redundancies; this is about determining whose knowledge matters, and whose is unnecessary. University leadership is committing epistemological violence by telling Latinos that in the great tradition of Western thought and reason, we do not belong; we have nothing to contribute. There is no place for us at the center of intellectual life—only as decorative additions to a canon we did not author and are not permitted to reshape.
In Texas, where immigration, voting rights, bilingual education, and curriculum wars are not abstract debates but live policy battlegrounds, eliminating a program uniquely equipped to analyze these issues is not neutral. It is the strategic sidelining of scholarship that interrogates power.It is the policing of racialized knowledge and intellectual sovereignty born out of struggle.
University leadership is committing epistemological violence by telling Latinos that in the great tradition of Western thought and reason, we do not belong.
Universities do not hollow themselves out overnight. They do so incrementally—through “reorganizations,” “realignments,” and “efficiencies” that just happen to fall hardest on programs studying race, ethnicity, gender, and inequality. The notice from President Davis makes clear that consolidation is the first step. Then comes the “review of the curriculum of these areas to determine what majors, minors, and courses will be offered in the newly formed departments.” Earlier this year, the university did away with faculty senate committees, effectively stripping the only real check of power that existed on campus. Now, two men at the top—President Davis and Provost Inboden—are making hasty decisions to bow to the political pressures of the legislature, with precious little, if any, concern for the impact it will have on students, faculty, and the community.
Mexican American and Latino Studies is not a fringe specialization. Far from it. It is central to understanding the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its continuing relevance to our understanding of who we are as a state. It is central to understanding labor movements and agricultural economies, educational segregation, education policy, border governance and migration regimes, cultural production, language politics, and civic identity. Without the expansive and vital knowledge and perspectives produced through Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, any account of Texas and the country as a whole will be incomplete.
We don’t live in Maine or Alaska. This is Texas—a border state that shares 1,254 miles with Mexico, touching Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Chihuahua—the longest international border of any state in the nation. Our politics, our economy, our schools, our labor markets, our public health systems, and our culture are shaped daily by that reality. To behave as though Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is peripheral here is not just shortsighted; it is a willful denial of the very geography and history that define us.
It is staggering that Texas would retreat from sustaining a robust program in Mexican American and Latino Studies. Yet context is king. At the very moment this department is being dismantled, the School of Civic Leadership—widely understood as a signature initiative of Provost Inboden—proclaims its mission to prepare “a rising generation to advance human flourishing in our state and nation.” The contradiction is impossible to ignore. In the future The University of Texas at Austin is curating, Latinos are present as demographics—but absent as intellectual architects of the public good.
Demographic reality appears to matter less than political optics. Or, if the growing number of Latinas and Latinos in Texas does matter to the future of our state—it seems that our community of highly acclaimed scholars are not to be trusted with shaping that conversation.
A conservative think tank at The University of Texas at Austin, is hosting an event titled “America’s Latino Future.” Not a single scholar from the Latino Research Institute, the Center for Mexican American Studies, or the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies was consulted or invited.
To wit, we recently learned that the Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank at The University of Texas at Austin, is hosting an event on February 20th titled “America’s Latino Future.” Not a single scholar from the Latino Research Institute, the Center for Mexican American Studies, or the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies was consulted or invited to participate in an area where we are unmistakably invested. To sideline the very scholars whose life’s work centers on Latino history, policy, and lived experience in a state that is nearly 40 percent Latino is not simply ironic. It is deeply offensive.
Historical memory teaches us that Mexican American and Latina/o Studies did not appear by dint of administrative grace. It was forged through decades of student walkouts, faculty organizing, and sustained community struggle. It was demanded in the face of indifference and defended against erasure. The existence of this Department was not a gift. It was a hard-won institutional transformation secured by those who refused to accept invisibility.
The official motto of The University of Texas at Austin is “what starts here changes the world.” The struggle that led to the creation of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies began on this campus over 50 years ago. The intellectual labor of those activists, scholars, and community members has indeed changed the world—reshaping scholarship, informing policy, transforming classrooms, and expanding the democratic imagination of this state. That legacy does not disappear because an administration chooses retrenchment over courage. We are the future. We will not be erased.
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Copyrighted by Alfonso Ayala III and is printed on Latinopia with his permission. Photo of jellyfish in the public domain. All other images copyrighted by Barrio Dog Productions Inc.