ABSTRACT
Gloria Anzaldua’s words provided a call to action as our research team thought deeply about what it means to do research in a college of education at one Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and explored the tensions and possibilities of our own research project. Literature on HSIs can be summarized in four categories: the designation of the HSI name, the demographic trends, the history of its development, and its ties to other minority-serving institutions. For many indigenous and minoritized people, research has served to reproduce unequal power relations through defining them as culturally and intellectually deficient other. Qualitative researchers, then, must employ critical methodologies to advance decolonial aims. Situating the researcher positionality and explicating the theoretical framework and critical reflection become necessary research activities in order to exhume biases and contexualize data analysis and interpretations. N. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln assert that “qualitative research, in many if not all of its forms, serves as a metaphor for colonial knowledge”.
