For many years now in the United States, the Latino population has been increasing and will continue to as the years go by. Because of this, as a country it is imperative that we try and learn about their history; this is what the Bridging Historias conference aims to do.

In 2013, faculty from 11 colleges received a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities, NEH, to look at the importance of adding Latino studies into community colleges. The NEH awards grants for top-rated proposals that are examined by independent and external reviews.

The grants allow professors and others to participate in these events and show how they went about implementing these studies into community colleges.

Bucks has received one of the grants for the upcoming panels and will be participating in the events that go along with grant. The participants from Bucks are John Petito, dean of the social and behavioral science department, Samantha Gross a professor of sociology and history professor, Jerry Millevoi, history professor and Sarah Jakub and sociology and history professor.

There will be several presentations and panels at the conference on May 8 from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and 365 Fifth Avenue, Elebash Recital Hall, New York.

The main questions and issues that participants will be responding to at the conference include: what does Latino Studies look like on the community college campus, where should its content be located in the institution’s curriculum, and in what ways is the development of Latino studies driven by student demographics.

“Here’s why this topic is enormously important. The Latino population has been one of its fastest growing in recent decades. According to the Pew Research Center, since 1970, the Latino population has grown 592 percent, largely because of the arrival of new immigrants from Latin America — especially Mexico. By comparison, the U.S. population overall has grown 56 percent over the same period. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, Latinos made up more than half of U.S. population growth,” said Millevoi.

Professor Jakub and Petitio will co-present Out of the Classroom and into the Communities. I talked with Sarah Jakub about what she will talk about at the conference and what they did to start implementing these studies into our community.

Jakub said that they collaborated with a Bronx community college professor and together they took a field trip with some Caucasian Bucks students and Dominican students. The students went to a Dominican restaurant and tried to learn about the other person’s culture.

Jakub said “we had the Caucasian and Dominican students interview each other and learn about each other’s cultures.”

Bucks County Community College currently does not have any Latino studies courses but through the work of these Bucks professors the administration will be convinced to add Latino studies courses in the future.

The NEH is trying to better blend Latino studies into community college curriculum and these conferences will be a great way of showing how these teachers have started to do just that.