LAUSR

Chapter 6 focuses on how students and the student-led organizations they engage in respond to politics, which is often mediated by their campus. Students who attend institutions such as the liberal arts college Reyes studied may be “in a bubble,” where their political engagement is responded to within their campus and rewarded by administrators or faculty. While institutions such as the regional public university offer “no incentives or distractions, and no boundaries” (p. 136) to students’ political engagement, which may result in more off-campus political mobilization. In chapter 7, Reyes uncovers students’ views on racial inequality and mobility. Reyes found that students at all 3 campuses often employed one of three narratives— meritocratic, oppression implicit, or oppression explicit—when explaining their views. Students who were members of nonpolitical organizations at the research university and regional public university were more likely to adapt a meritocratic narrative. Students who were members of political organizations at the research university and regional public university, and all students at the liberal arts college, were more likely to adapt an oppression narrative that acknowledged systemic inequalities, but did not always tie these inequalities to historical inequality (although students with the oppression explicit narrative did make these connections). Reyes’s work adds to the expanding body of research examining the racialized collegiate experiences of Latina/o/x students pursuing a degree in the United States. Learning to be Latino is complementary to recent texts that focus on the experiences of Latina/o/x students in higher education including: Latinx/a/os in Higher Education: Exploring Identity, Pathways, and Success, edited by Batista, Collado, and Pérez (2018); and Latina/o Student Leadership: Emerging Theory, Promising Practice, edited by Lozano (2015). Reyes contributes to the existing body of literature and these texts by providing a rich, in-depth description of how institutional type and students’ involvement in culturally based organizations contribute to Latina/o/x students’ experiences and their identity development in critical ways underexamined in other works. Reyes acknowledges the inherent impact of spaces created by Latina/o/x organizations while providing a more nuanced understanding about how students’ identities can be influenced by the structure, location, and demographic makeup of the institution they attend.