By Sahana Jayaraman

The University of Maryland has no Latin American Studies major — a fact that may a come as a surprise, given that Latinx students made up 8.2 percent of the campus population, according to a breakdown of students enrolled between Winter 2017 and Spring 2018.

What the university does have, however, is a certificate program for Latin American studies, established through the Latin American Studies Center (LASC). LASC celebrated its 30th anniversary at H.J. Patterson’s Global Crossroads Atrium April 2.

While the center has officially been around since 1989, it’s unofficial conception can be traced back to the 1960s. All four of the center’s previous directors attended the anniversary event to look back on LASC’s past and share their visions for its future.

LASC’s founder Saùl Sosnowski, who served as the center’s first director, reminisced about its beginnings.

“The gestation of the center itself took longer than the gestation of elephants,” Sosnowski said. “We didn’t just want to be…just one more center within the academy that dealt with Latin American nations, we wanted to be integrated into Latin America.”

Aside from providing students with an interdisciplinary education revolving around Latin American and Caribbean cultures, LASC also gives Latinx students a space to socialize with one another.

“LASC often [provides] a sense of home away from home…and a sense of refuge, communication and connection that isn’t always provided in [other] home departments, ” LASC’s current director Britta Anderson said.

Blanca Arriola Palma is a senior at UMD, graduating in May with a LASC certificate on her transcript. She describes her involvement with LASC as one of the most fulfilling aspects of her college years.

“ [LASC gave me] a space where I felt like I was a part of a community,” Arriola Palmer said. ”[the] program allowed me to learn more about my Latinx roots and just connect to the history that I didn’t get to learn since my parents and I migrated to the United States from El Salvador.”

However, despite LASC’s overwhelming support from its students and faculty, Sosnowski said the center’s relationship with university administration has been tense at times.

According to Sosnowski, LASC was once able to secure Title VI federal funding for one funding cycle, remaining the only center to have done so on the Maryland campus to date.

However, the center’s subsequent applications failed to obtain the same funding, an occurrence Sosnowski attributes to inadequate university support.

“Why didn’t we succeed in future applications? Very simply, because the university didn’t put in the resources [they] were supposed to allocate to [LASC],” Sosnowski said. “It did not foster the development of the [Latin American Studies] major, and it did not contribute to funding other aspects of the center.”

The university also asked LASC to shift its focus from graduate research — the pillar the center was originally built on — to undergraduate involvement, a change that Anderson says brought with it a sense of loss for the center’s directors and faculty.

“[As to] what we should be doing in the future, I’m not going to be prescribing anything to anybody,” Sosnowski said. “But at the same time, as we bring in undergraduates, we need to bring back the graduates in full force…and we have to work more with faculty across the campus.”