History
In the Spring of 2020, the then University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Chancellor Michael Amiridis, Professor Amalia Pallares, Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Engagement, and Professor María de los Ángeles Torres, LAS Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, identified the need to create a consortium of Carnegie designated Research 1 and Hispanic Serving Institutions to advance research on U.S. Latinas/os/x, to strengthen the pipeline to the professoriate, and develop new collaborative research agendas.
In the summer of 2020, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded UIC’s Office of Diversity and the Latin American and Latino Studies Program, a Mellon Officer’s Grant to create the consortium to enable scholarly collaborations and a new institutional infrastructure for broad collaboration across multiple Latino Studies Humanities projects and engaged Scholarship.
On October 29-30, 2020, the first convening of R1 HSI Presidents and Chancellors under the rubric Crossing Latinidades: Building Comparative Latin@ Studies took place virtually to start the blueprint for collaboration leading to the successful submission of a $5 million Latino humanities grant to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.