Mexican American Studies

Overview

Key Features

The Department of Mexican American Studies (MAS) at the University of Arizona offers interdisciplinary degree programs designed to study, recover and disseminate knowledge of the history, culture, and intellectual legacy of Chicanx, Mexican, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples in the United States and across the Américas. The Mexican American Studies program from University of Arizona does this through decolonial epistemologies, pedagogies, and scholarship located at the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. We consider social change imperative for the empowerment of Chicanx, Mexican, Indigenous, and Latinx populations who are disproportionately impacted by legacies of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and their contemporary manifestations.

As the leading intellectual and advocacy institution in Arizona, the Department of Mexican American Studies contributes to the knowledge about, and produced by Chicanx, Mexican, Indigenous, and Latinx populations, while engaging, sharing, and recommending public policy positions that are relevant to these communities, such as issues related to public health/wellness, (im)migration, the U.S.-Mexico border, education, social justice, transborder organizing, Latinx urbanization, Indigenous systems of healing, environmental and food justice, criminal justice and judicial system to educators, students, communities, elected officials, policy makers, media, and other stakeholders as a process of undoing systemic racism and exclusion.

MAS at the University of Arizona is active in the Mexican American Studies struggle and is firmly committed to training future generations of scholars whose research is rooted in social justice. The department works collaboratively with community organizations to address issues and produce knowledge benefiting historically marginalized communities in the U.S. and transnationally.