Race, Rurality, & College Access in New Mexico

This is an in-store event and will be live-streamed to Zoom, register for Zoom here.

""Race and Rurality: Considerations for Advancing Higher Education Equity" is a perfectly timed book highlighting areas of need in our rural communities. Seeking to significantly change the narrative of monolithic rural communities and spotlight the unique opportunities and challenges of rural students of Color, this book is an essential read for policymakers and leaders of higher education institutions." -- Allen Pratt, Executive Director of the National Rural Education Association, USA

Contributors Tobe Bott-Lyons and Hanna Negishi Levin will be in conversation with Deputy Secretary of Higher Education, Patricia Trujillo to discuss the role of education in bridging the rural/urban opportunity gap. This conversation will interrogate myths and misconceptions about race, place, and higher education and explore innovative and homegrown approaches to supporting New Mexican students. Their chapter “Urbanormativity, College Access, and Rural First-Generation Students of Color in Northern New Mexico: A Case Study” appears in Race and Rurality: Considerations for Advancing Higher Education Equity.

This book offers context, research, policy, and practice-based recommendations centering college access and success for a historically overlooked population: rural Students and Communities of Color.

Through an exploration of how colleges and universities can effectively welcome students from rural areas who identify as Asian and Pacific Islander, Black and African American, Hispanic and Latinx, and/or Indigenous, this text challenges the misleading narrative that rural is white, thereby placing these students and their communities in conversation with national higher education discourse. Rich contributions on scholarship, practice, and policy address the intersection of racism and spatial inequities and consider the unique opportunities and challenges that rural Students and Communities of Color face across the United States’ higher education landscape. Chapters provide direction on creating equitable policies and practices, as well as details of the assets, resources, and networks that support this population’s success.

This edited collection provides a wealth of insight into the recruitment, access, persistence, and retention of rural Students of Color, equipping higher education researchers, practitioners, administrators, and policymakers with the knowledge they need to better account for and support rural students and communities across race and ethnicity.

About the Contributors

Hanna Negishi Levin is the Deputy Director of the Davis New Mexico Scholarship. Growing up as part of diasporic communities and traditions, she is interested in questions of rootedness and how people create mythologies of home and place. In her work in college access, these themes are recurrent. Her professional background has been in K-12 education, primarily as it relates to college access, early teacher training, and out-of-school time programming. Hanna holds a B.A. in sociology from Pomona College.

Tobe Bott-Lyons, PhD is the director of the Upward Bound program at Northern New Mexico College in Española. His current research/practice is focussed on policies and programs to support and expand college access in northern New Mexico. As a practitioner, Tobe has developed and implemented educational, youth, and community development programs in northern NM including: college student success , summer bridge, and first-year experience; college transition and access programs for high school equivalency students; and, rural-serving college access programs.

Moderator: Dr. Patricia Trujillo, PhD is the Deputy Cabinet Secretary of New Mexico Higher Education Department. She formerly served as founding director of the Office of Equity and Diversity at Northern New Mexico College since 2013, where she oversaw programming to address access and inclusion for historically underrepresented populations in higher education.

About the Editors

Tyler Hallmark is Program Associate of Higher Education at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Higher Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, USA.

Sonja Ardoin is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Student Affairs at Clemson University, USA.

Darris R. Means is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Executive Director for Rural and Community-Based Education at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.