♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ Hey, hey (upbeat music) - Welcome to "Horizonte," a show that takes a look at current issues through a Hispanic lens.

I'm your host, Catherine Anaya.

Arizona State University's Hispanic Research Center has redirected its focus.

It had a relaunch last fall to expand beyond arts and culture.

The center will now focus on highlighting the nuanced differences among Hispanics in Arizona who hail from 21 different countries.

Now, before we talk to the director of the center, let's find out more about what it does.

(gentle music) We are here at the Hispanic Research Center, looking at a set of 11 lithographs by Chicana and Chicano artists.

Each piece was commissioned by the center in the 1990s and early 2000s in an effort to promote and celebrate the fine art of Mexican American artists in Arizona and around the country.

Today we will be focusing our attention on the method each of these artists used to make these artworks, a printmaking process known as lithography.

Beautiful and historical.

We'll talk more about that in a moment, but joining me now is Stella Rouse, director of the center to talk more about its new direction.

Good to see you, Stella.

Thank you.

- Nice to see you, Catherine.

Thank you.

- So let's talk about this new direction.

It was relaunched, the center itself, and this was to really respond to the growing and diverse Hispanic population that exists right here in Arizona.

Can you tell me a little bit about why that was so important to do now?

- Yes, I think the ASU administration saw the role of the center as being supportive of exactly that, the growing Latino Hispanic population in Arizona, the new, or at the time newly designation HSI, Hispanic Serving Institution designation of ASU, with a center that's a university-level center.

It's not in any one department.

And so the flexibility that gives a center to be able to collaborate and do different things, I think was very important to the university.

And so the elevating it and expanding what it does was something that was a priority.

- And the center has been around since 1985.

How does the center differ now with this relaunch to what it was back in 1985?

- Yes, I think early on, certainly the Hispanic Chicano population was a lot smaller at the university.

And so perhaps what the focus was at the time to increase student and faculty of Chicano Hispanic descent was really important at the time.

That focus grew to be art and culture, because the directors at the time had a very humanist approach to the work of Hispanics.

And so I think now it's getting back to some of what originally was intended for the center was to be a research-focused center, but broadly defined, not to get away from the culture aspect of it, but to maybe incorporate research into that culture, and expand into other areas that are important to understanding the Latino population.

- So there is the shift now to more research-based for the center.

Can you talk to me a little bit about what kind of research you'll be looking at?

- Sure, so some of the research we'll be doing is polling, polling Arizona Latinos, comparing attitudes of Arizona Latinos to Arizona, more broadly defined or the broader electorate, taking art and culture and actually injecting a research component to that to study what the salt and culture actually means, the representation by artists, what students from a younger generation take out of what the old art and culture is.

We also are looking to expand to working with like, for example, the city of Phoenix historical Latino sites, Latino properties, and how we can preserve the Latino heritage in Phoenix working with the Latino professionals of America, and in the work that they do.

So we're very much connected not only to the campus, but to the community and expanding in areas that touch Latinos, which is very broad.

- Absolutely, and you have a political science background, and as we know with every election cycle, Latinos become more and more important to the outcomes.

Talk to me a little bit about the research that you did with this latest election cycle in Latinos and voting, and what that told us about what's happening in the community right now.

- Sure, so I think folks who study Latinos and Latino attitudes have have seen sort of a, what we call sort of an evolving identity.

And I think that not only has to do with the heterogeneity of the Latino population in the countries that they come from, but also we just have a growing number of Latinos who are native-born and are American.

They are, you know, very distant from the immigrant experience.

And I think that produces different attitudes and opinions about different topics.

Immigration is one of those topics that we saw in our poll that we did last year where we had a huge number of Latinos who supported Prop 314.

That is not something we would've seen a generation ago with a bill like SB 1070 that was very similar to Prop 314.

But I think the attitudes of Latinos are different when it comes to immigration.

And part of that is having a huge native-born population and how they see and think about immigration.

- Mm-hmm, and how did you explain some of this research, not just to the community but nationally as well, because I know there was a lot of attention focused on the center when this research came out.

There was a lot of interest in it.

- Yes, we did an op-ed in the Arizona Republic and we got a lot of international press about the poll.

I think the way that we're explaining it is the need to not be stuck in a traditional sense of what we define as Latino, as what we define as being very much, you know, revolving around the immigration experience, but to really understand that Latino means a lot of different things.

It may mean not being able to speak Spanish, and being English only or bilingual.

It may mean not really having a sense of what the immigrant experience is like.

It may mean having different opinions about the economy and what should happen with the economy, but at the same time, it may also mean that some immigrants who come from countries that, you know, have had a lot of political turmoil are conditioned about that in terms of their political beliefs and what the United States should do.

So it's just very different and very evolving in the way that we look at it.

And so we like to take an approach of saying the Latino identity is evolving, and we need to evolve with it in the way that we approach how we study Latino identity.

- It's very important the research that you're doing, but I wanna mention again that the Hispanic Research Center is still going to maintain its literature and arts roots that it became known for back in 1985.

Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Because we saw some of the art that still is maintained in the center.

- Of course that's the foundation of the center.

The former director that preceded me had a passion for all art and culture and literature.

And so we think that's an important component of moving forward.

We just wanna evolve how we use that art and culture in terms of education, in terms of research, while putting it out there for the community to see, to appreciate and to be educated about the Latino, Hispanic, Chicano community.

- There is an exhibit taking place in Phoenix, correct?

- No, the ASU Art Museum.

- [Catherine] Okay.

- Yes.

So there's been two waves.

We're in the second wave of the exhibition that is focusing on the Hispanic Research Center art collection.

It's there through June.

The new wave of that started in January, goes through June.

And we had a previous one from August to December.

And so it gave us a great opportunity to be able to share the art, a lot of it, which was in storage, because we don't have the space to really put it out.

So we're very grateful to the ASU Art Museum for wanting to do this exhibition that focuses on the Hispanic art and the Hispanic Research Center collection.

- Well, it's such a great way to involve the community in a lot of the history through the arts.

And we mention literature because there is some very popular and important literature that's still available through the center online, right?

- It is.

The bilingual press is also part of the history of the center, and we have titles from Chicano authors.

Part of the reason that that was brought forward was to give Chicano authors an opportunity to publish their work.

It's still limited in the world that we live in, their opportunity to do that.

And we hope to do that in the future, is to publish new Chicano authors, new Latino authors, and grow our collection.

- Talk to me a little bit about your relationship with the community, and when I say your, I mean the center, the center's relationship with the community at large, the partnerships that you've created and what you're hoping to establish moving forward with some of those connections.

- Yeah, our hope is not just to do sort of internalized research about Latinos.

We want research that's practical, that's gonna be applicable, and that is gonna compliment the work that a lot of community partners in the Latino community do, so for example, Chicanos por la Causa and the work that they do to help immigrant communities, to help Latinos in terms of health disparities, upward mobility, those are things that we wanna be involved in.

And we hope that the research the center can do can inform and promote that kind of work.

And so those are the partners that we're looking for.

We want to be an outward public facing center that is all encompassing about the lives of Latinos and Hispanics.

- Are there any plans to do some outreach with, say, younger generations to get them also involved in what's happening here on campus?

Not just with the students who are here getting their education, but maybe the students who might be here eventually?

- Absolutely, I think that's very important to look at the next generations of Latinos that are coming up.

I do work on generations, so I know how important it is to do outreach and to get them involved and engage.

That's really important to mobilize Latino and young Latinos in different ways.

Not only politics, but social, economic, cultural involvement is really important, and we hope to do that kind of outreach as well.

- What research are you working on now for the future?

- I'm currently, personally or the center?

- [Catherine] For the center.

- Oh, okay, well, we're doing a lot of the work on the Arizona poll.

Like I mentioned, we hope to institutionalize the poll and be able to do it on a regular basis, because I think there's a need out there to understand specifically Arizona Latinos, compare Arizona Latinos to the broader Arizona community and to the national community, which was what was really unique about our poll in our ability to do that.

So we wanna expand that kind of work.

We also wanna expand the polling to look at other areas besides politics and policy preferences, you know, in the things that Latinos deal with, like I said, upper mobility, health disparities, food disparities, and certainly the issue of immigration is gonna continue to be a hot button issue.

So how Latinos evolve on that issue is really important for, I think, the policies that will be set in the future.

- Mm-hmm, with your connection, with the center's connection to ASU, is there a lot of student involvement in what's happening with the center?

- So we're hoping to, you know, ramp that up in terms of the student involvement.

We have some student involvement, we have student workers, but we really wanna do things like, for example, last year we had a research poster competition that was just for graduate students.

We hope to do things like that for undergraduate students.

There's also a plan to perhaps have a reading group that takes advantage of the literature that we have at the center.

And so we are thinking of a number of ways that we can involve students further in the work of the center.

- I wanna let people know where they can find information about the center.

It's ASU, it's HRC, rather, Hispanic Research Center.

hrc.asu.edu.

And on that website, people can find out more about the history of the center, but also, you have some resources on there as well.

- Absolutely, we update it with everything that we're involved in doing.

We also have a page for the bilingual press where you can purchase Chicano books that are our prime titles in our collection.

And find out how you can support us.

You know, we welcome any sort of support, financial or otherwise.

We wanna be a center that is certainly available to the community and a resource to the community.

- Well, it is an important center, and you're doing great work.

So thank you so much for coming on and sharing that with us.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you, Catherine.

Appreciate it.

- Okay.

Good to see you, Stella.

Thanks.

And that's our show, for "Horizonte" and Arizona PBS.

I'm Catherine Anaya.

Thanks so much for watching.

♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ Hey, hey (upbeat music)