Critical Multicultural Latin@ Mentoring in Higher Education

Abstract

Despite the initiatives for diverse faculty, the recruitment, retention and percentage of faculty of diverse cultural backgrounds, Latin@s in particular, remain low. This speaks to the apparent disinterest of many institutions in acknowledging the visible and invisible obstacles that impede the full and equal integration of Latin@ faculty into the ranks of the professoriate and academe. Assistance from a mentor can help this transition by clarifying short and long term priorities, as well as balancing strategies to move forward in teaching and other scholarly work. Of course, when first-year tenure-track faculty thrive, recruitment of quality colleagues and retention increase, as well as the respective programs and the students enrolled within the programs. The authors examine current themes of their mentoring experiences in higher education and highlight the importance of critical multicultural mentorship in closing the gaps in mentoring for non-dominant faculty in higher education. In their conclusion, the protege and mentor suggest the need to disrupt deficit ideology by engaging in critical reflections on the complexity of cross-race/ethnicity mentoring in higher education.