Central American Studies - 15 Years of Education, Community, and Activism

The Central American Studies Program was created in 2000 to empower the large and growing Central American community in the United States by promoting academic excellence, community involvement, and cultural diversity; to open spaces of global citizenship and dialogue between academia and society that contribute to the construction of a Central American transnational identity; and to promote an understanding and appreciation of the diverse Central American cultures, ethnicities, experiences, and worldviews from an interdisciplinary global perspective.

Central American Studies is an emerging discipline. It is an interdisciplinary academic space that emphasizes the transnational character of Central American communities in the diaspora. The courses that fall under the category of Central American Studies offer a variety of perspectives and approaches, including the study of politics, gender, art, culture, identity, and literature with the diverse issues and worldviews relevant to Central American peoples, our communities, and their transnational reality.

Central American Studies questions the portrayal of the Central American identity as Hispanic. We seek to open spaces for the knowledge and understanding of Central America’s diverse cultural and ethnic identities. Of course, one must also make a distinction between the nationalistic construction of identity with a foundation on an Indigenous distant past, and the Central American identity that our community’s reality demands: one that is constructed by diverse cultural and ethnic Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean identities coexisting with the Latino and European consciousness not only in our distant past but also in our present, a present that is marked by its transnational context. It is in this transnational space that Central American peoples battle for legalization and immigrant rights.