Fugitive Servingness: The Art of Subversive Practices in HSIs

Jarvis R. Givens theorizes that fugitive pedagogy includes the subversive educational acts that Black educators performed while enslaved and through Jim Crow to ensure Black children were learning despite anti-Black exclusion and confinement. Givens notes that Black education was always a fugitive project as enslaved people were forbidden to read and write across southern states. Under strict antiliteracy laws, reading and writing was literally criminalized, thus making the act of educating and becoming educated a fugitive act.  Even after slavery was dismantled, access to adequate educational opportunities for Black Americans was challenging under strict Jim Crow laws. Within segregated Black schools, white surveillance was prevalent; thus, Black educators, including teachers and principals, were regulated, policed, and punished at the hands of white school officials, including superintendents and board members. Yet Black educators resisted, developing strategies at the personal, interpersonal, and school-wide levels to assure Black children experienced joy and empowerment. They also ensured that Black children learned about their personal and political history in an affirmative way.

Students in a classroom.

While Givens asks, “What has been the nature of Black people’s relationship to the American school?” (p. 10) I ask, “What is the nature of Latine people’s relationship to education under the Trump regime?” While I acknowledge that Givens’ argument is based on over 300 years of anti-Black policing and exclusion from educational systems in the United States, I remind us that Latine students in K-12 schools during Jim Crow were also segregated in under-resourced schools and stripped of their language and cultural assets. But more important is the current state of fear and erasure under the Trump regime as Latines are largely the target of anti-immigrant sentiments, illegal ICE raids, and attacks on the Spanish language.   

Moreover, the very colleges and universities where a majority of Latine students are enrolled—Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs)—are being attacked and undermined by the 47^th president of the United States. Under the guise of anti-DEI rhetoric, this administration is laser focused on dismantling civil rights progress since the 1960s, including progress made by HSIs to enroll and educate one of the fastest growing college-going populations—Latine students. To be clear, HSIs are preserved under the Higher Education Act, meaning they continue to exist as a legal construct by law signed by Congress. Yet the Department of Justice has inappropriately used the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case to question the constitutionality of enrollment-based MSIs, and the Department of Education has used this argument to defund and reprogram discretionary funding earmarked for HSIs under Title V.

These actions have led many HSI leaders and Title V directors across the country to withdraw all previous commitments to becoming Latine-serving HSIs. Many feel like it is now illegal to be an HSI, retracting all HSI specific programming, rhetoric, and strategic planning. Campuses have canceled Latine focused graduations and closed Latine cultural centers in order to comply with “the law” that isn’t actually law, because a Dear Colleague letter is not law. In some states with large numbers of HSIs, including Florida and Texas, anti-DEI state-level legislation has actually made it illegal to center the lived realities of Latines in the curricular and cocurricular structures, which is devastating to the large and growing number of Latine students in these states.

But to be clear, you don’t need federal eligibility or a Title V grant to be an HSI…you are still an HSI and still must practice servingness.

Under this current political climate, I feel it is appropriate to draw from Givens’ conceptualization of fugitive pedagogy to advance the idea of fugitive servingness. While the education of Latine people is not illegal, anti-DEI legislation is making HSI-ness illegal in some states while federal rhetoric around HSIs and unconstitutionality are making HSIs feel pseudo-illegal in others. But we cannot and must not retreat all commitments to servingness.

I contend that fugitive servingness is the social and rhetorical framing of HSI efforts and the praxis of creating humanizing, anti-racist, and socially just practices for educating Latines in colleges and universities. It is a way to carry out servingness—which includes assessment and reflection on current practices for serving the growing population of Latine students on campus and the intentional actions taken to create a more equitable and inclusive environment—despite efforts to delegitimize HSIs. Fugitive servingness calls on HSI educators and leaders to find the strength and courage to engage in subversive acts of cariño for the Latine population on campus, even if it feels illegal. I call on you to have the same courage that Black educators had during times of enslavement and Jim Crow when the consequences were just as harsh, if not more unforgiving.   

Practice subversive acts in the classroom

Dear faculty, it is your job to practice fugitive servingness in the classroom. Whether you work in a red state or a blue state, the classroom is the most important place to practice subversive acts. Your course does not need to have terms like “diversity,” “equity,” “Latino,” “Muslim,” “CRT,” “gay,” “whiteness” or any other term that has been banned in order to teach about the lived realities, histories, and stories of resistance of communities of color.  You can and should teach through an anti-racism, social justice lens regardless of the class name. And yes, introductory calculus, organic chemistry, psychology, and political science are all important courses to practice fugitive servingness. The classroom is never neutral and has always been one of the most important places to protest. I teach a class called “Politics and History of Higher Education” which is a neutral course title, yet I offer a revisionist perspective of history starting with Ron Takaki’s A Different Mirror to help reframe the way students think about history. The class is anti-racist, critical, and revisionist, even if the title and course description are not.

Practice subversive acts outside of the classroom

Just like the classroom, student services and cocurricular spaces are not neutral. Again, you don’t have to work in a cultural center or program for undocumented students or men of color to intentionally center the identities and lived realities of Latine students or advance social justice priorities. For the multilingual educators out there, linguistic servingness is one of the most subversive acts you can practice. Every advising session, every counseling session, every interaction with students is a time to practice subversive acts and ensure they are being served in identity-centered ways. And yes, the financial aid office, the library, the office for students with disabilities, the health center, and even the campus fitness center are all important spaces to practice fugitive servingness. Ask yourself if your program or service is considering the reality of students right now, some of whom are members of mixed status families living in fear of abduction, some of whom are experiencing housing and food insecurity because of the rising costs of basic needs, and some of whom will lose access to financial aid as a result of changing policies passed by federal government. No matter where you work on campus, students need to feel seen and heard, and they need you to think differently about the ways we can serve them. And if you remain fearful, work directly with students to support their efforts to advance servingness; that too is subversive.  

Now is the time to be brave, be subversive, and resist the fascist attacks on our colleges and universities. In the words of fierce activist Dolores Huerta, “Sí se puede!”