Director’s Letter Fall 2025

U.S. Latino/a Studies Program

USLS DIRECTOR’S LETTER

FALL 2025

Dear Extended Iowa State University Community,

I am delighted to welcome all to a new semester of learning from curiosity to credit. And may the credits also inspire curiosity!

This semester I am delighted to welcome our US Latino/a Studies Ambassador, Natalia “Nat” Rodríguez-Felipe and our two oral history scholarship interns, Vanessa Chavez Tellez and Kaitlyn Guadarrama. All three wonderful women on this year’s team took the USLS 3770 Memoir and Oral History class. The project based learning that took place in the classroom now serves them well as they tutor USLS students, and reach out to create a new oral history archive featuring student voices from Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc. and Lambda Theta Nu Sorority, Inc.

Please be sure to check out the growing Latina/o/x Oral history archive at Parks Library, https://digitalcollections.lib.iastate.edu/voces/ and https://digitalcollections.lib.iastate.edu/voces/timeline.html.

Our affiliated faculty continue to offer career enhancing courses in the School of Ed, History, Anthropology, Spanish, Latina/o Studies (please check out course offerings online!). And our graduates in the world are succeeding in ways that make ISU proud. For example, Anlis Mercado Rios is now a practicing lawyer, and Natalie Rivera is currently a doctoral student in the School of Criminal Justice and Chicano Latino Studies at Michigan State University.

I am proud to see my students succeed and create community across communities.

Please be sure to visit our webpage for updates and pictures!

https://language.iastate.edu/category/us-latino-a-studies/

I look forward to connecting with many of you at our Fall coffee and donuts event, Wednesday November 12 at 10:30 am in the LSRC, Pearson Hall.

Here’s to an amazing fall semester!

Professor Suárez, Ph.D.