Recognizing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Week
September 8 – 14, 2025, is National Hispanic-Serving Institutions Week, an opportunity, according to the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), “to highlight the essential role Hispanic-Serving Institutions play in serving students and their communities by sustaining opportunity, preparing a skilled workforce, and supporting local economies.” San Diego State University was first designated as a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in 2012 and is one of 21 California State University campuses recognized as HSIs. SDSU is the only CSU campus that is recognized by the federal government as an HSI and by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as an “R1” institution, a “community engaged” institution, and an “opportunity university” (a new designation highlighting an institution’s ability to combine educational affordability with a record of strong postgraduate earnings). In each of these distinctive dimensions, the University Library plays an important role in helping SDSU achieve its goals as “a new kind of HSI.”
As at many research universities, library support for the HSI mission of promoting Hispanic student success at SDSU, as well as engagement with faculty and community members, begins with library collections, including the Chicana/o Collection on the Mesa Campus and the Border Collection at SDSU Imperial Valley. The library’s Department of Special Collections and University Archives also includes rare books, manuscripts, and archives documenting the Chicana/o experience at SDSU and in the broader San Diego community. Our continuing commitment to building these collections and strengthening our connection with local Hispanic communities can be seen in our support for the Chicano Archive Project and our receipt of a $300,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources to digitize archival materials related to the Chicana/o education movement in San Diego. Many of these programs are led by library faculty recruited for the expertise in these areas, including Latin American Languages and Cultures Librarian Maria Amor and Latin American and Indigenous Communities Archivist Erika Esquivel.
Digital initiatives are also at the center of our transborder engagement with libraries, archives, and museums in Mexico to establish the Colecciones de Instituciones Mexicanas, a collection of archival materials demonstrating our contribution to SDSU’s distinctive identity as a global research university committed to sustainable partnerships with Latin American institutions of higher education and cultural heritage organizations. The SDSU commitment to promoting collaboration throughout the border region can be seen especially clearly in the “Preserving and Revealing Tijuana’s Past” project (with the City of Tijuana’s Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura) and the upcoming Transborder Library Forum (with CETYS Universidad in Mexicali).
The Library also seeks out partnerships supporting student success, including our collaboration with the Division of Student Success and Campus Diversity to establish the Latinx Resource Center in a library space immediately adjacent to the Chicana/o Collection and complementing our long-time partnership with the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. The Library has also provided support for students participating in SDSU’s Compact Scholars Program, a partnership between SDSU and the Sweetwater Union High School District to promote recruitment and retention of students graduating from SUHSD, a district whose student body is over 75% Hispanic or Latino. These curricular and co-curricular partnerships allow the library to enhance and extend programs designed to promote Hispanic student success as well as a sense of belonging and community at the university, e.g., through programs like Dia de los Muertos and Dia de los Ninos/Dia de los Libros as well as the creation of spaces that reflect the experience of our Hispanic community.
Through its program of collections, services, community, and international engagement, the San Diego State University Library provides a model not only for academic and research libraries seeking to make a distinctive contribution to any Hispanic-Serving Institution, but demonstrates how the library remains at the heart of SDSU’s commitment to creating a path forward as a “new kind of HSI.”
