One of the stories in the history of Andover I personally find interesting is the story of Latino students at Andover. Not only due to my personal connection to the topic, but also because of the rise of admission for Latino students in recent years.
In honor of Hispanic heritage month, I found it fitting to reflect on the school’s history with Latino students, a group often forgotten in conversations surrounding the school. Unfortunately, not much is known about the school’s early efforts to recruit students from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. According to the Greener Report commissioned in 1999, the administration began counting the number of Latinos in the late ’80s. However, the earliest mention of Latino students I could find, thanks to Academy Archivist Dr. Paige Roberts, was in a directory of alumni between the years 1942 to1989. In the class of 1942, there were several students marked with an ‘H’ next to their names, a possible reference to the word Hispanic. However, Andover’s history with the Latino community began in the late ’60s in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. At this time, Black students at Andover formed the African American Student Association, which by 1974, expanded its mission to include the growing number of Latino students. This led to the formation of Afro Latine American Society (AfLatAm), the oldest standing cultural club on campus. Despite all these efforts made to diversify and make an accepting space within the institution, diversity was still lacking. According to the Greener Study, a report commissioned by the school to look into diversity issues, there was “no Latino cultural club and no Latino advisor in the CaMD office.” There was also the feeling that AfLatAm was oriented around Black students rather than Latinos. Moreover the club L’Alianza, which existed between 1997-1998, was officially disbanded after the appointment of a Latina faculty member ended. This lack of Latino faculty was highlighted by a student interviewed by the Greener Report, “There’s no Latino faculty member that I can go to and just talk about stuff that no one else understands… with all the faculty members and all the workers that we have here, none of them are Latino except for the (food workers) in [Paresky] Commons.” Thanks to the report things began to change. More Latino Faculty and students began to be admitted and notably in 2017 Alianza Latina became an affinity space for Latino students on campus.
When looking back at the Latino experience at Andover it is very easy to see the gaps in knowledge and understanding. The fact that we don’t even know when the first Latinos students arrived to Andover is a telling reminder of how in the past, this group was often lumped in with other minorities, or just forgotten entirely. While this fact hasn’t been exactly conducive to accurate historiography, what makes it worse is that there has been little to no interest in learning more. This has become a harder pill to swallow in a time when the country has become around 20 percent Latino and the school has begun to reflect on the legacies of its Black and Asian students. I believe that Andover would now more than ever benefit from drawing attention to the history of Latinos at the school, so that we can gain a deeper understanding of the school’s history with this group. Along with this, it would also allow us as a community to more easily learn and applaud these students and faculty’s contributions to the institution itself and the world at large, which have been forgotten or obscured by time.
Special thanks to Doctor Roberts who helped get me information on this topic.
