The United States is the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, and a newly formed Interfaculty Committee on Latino Studies seeks to reflect that reality at Harvard. Nearly 60 students braved last week's snowstorm to offer advice, support, and, above all, enthusiasm for the new initiative.

Professor of Education Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, the new committee's chairperson, said the group seeks to promote teaching and research at Harvard on the U.S. Latino population as well as a sense of community among Harvard faculty and students with Latino interests.

The community-building seemed to have already begun, as students -- undergraduates and graduate students from the Divinity School, Law School, Business School, Education School, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences -- vented their frustrations and voiced their aspirations to the three faculty committee representatives present. Most of the students are affiliated with Concilio Latino, an umbrella organization for the various Latino student groups at Harvard's schools.

Dialogue at the meeting focused on identifying potential strategies students could use to attract attention to Latino needs at Harvard.

At the top of the students' list is recruiting more senior faculty in Latino studies. Harvard received fairly good marks for Latino Visiting Scholars, lecturers, and junior faculty, but as one student lamented, "I can't write a dissertation in a year. Junior faculty are great for classes, but if you can't be sure someone is staying, the whole next generation of Latino scholarship is likely to suffer."

Many students pointed to specific needs such as immigration law at the Law School and a Latino bilingual education expert at the Education School. Felipe Agredano, a Divinity School graduate now working at Radcliffe, explained how students there developed a Latino syllabus and systematically identified Latino academics and set goals with the administration for recruitment.

"There are a lot of opportunities to make things happen," commented John Coatsworth, director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, who received lively applause when he pointed out that the United States is second only to Mexico in its numbers of Spanish speakers. The new Interfaculty Committee, composed of faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and five of Harvard's professional schools, forms part of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS).

"Latino Studies will contribute not only to addressing an under-represented and burgeoning population in this country; it will also help to update and to energize the field that represents all of us citizens and residents of the United States," said Doris Sommer, professor of Romance languages and literatures, and a committee member.

Latino studies at Harvard is dedicated to promoting the scholarly study of the Latino population of the United States and its place in the changing Americas. To further these investigations, the committee is planning a major conference next fall on "Latinos in the 21st Century: Setting the Research Agenda," which Suárez-Orozco is organizing with Coatsworth, Sommer, and Gary Orfield, professor of education and social policy in the Kennedy School and the Graduate School of Education. The conference will involve two dozen leading scholars, invited to Harvard to map an agenda for research in Latino studies into the next century. The conference will be both comparative and interdisciplinary in its focus on the Latino population of the United States.

"More is going on at Harvard in the area of Latino research than is generally perceived, but the whole does not yet add up to more than the sum of its parts," observed Coatsworth, who is Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs. "Some people -- both faculty and students -- are working on similar issues and don't even know each other. There could be more synergism and much better communication."

He added, "The Latin American Center has supported both Latino and Iberian studies at Harvard since its founding in 1994," pointing to the three-year-old DRCLAS-supported course on Latino Cultures, taught by Suárez-Orozco and Sommer, as an example.

Along with Suárez-Orozco and Sommer, Coatsworth called for student participation and leadership in planning and setting priorities for Latino studies.

Many students asked about the possibility of a Certificate in Latino Studies or the creation of an academic department, similar to that of Afro-American Studies. While the first step toward these possible goals is increasing the number of Latino faculty and the level of student research projects, the persistent question seemed to point to a larger theme.

"The increasing presence of Latinos in the United States is stretching more than the boundaries of what we now consider Latin American studies; it is also complicating the field of U.S.-based American Studies," pointed out Sommer. "Latino studies, along with African-American studies, Asian-American studies, and a reviving field of Native-American studies can now join the Anglo- American tradition to develop a broader, more interesting, and more democratic field of interactions that are often defined along ethnic lines.

The Committee on Ethnic Studies, several faculty members in the graduate program of the History of American Civilization, and other allied programs have already embarked on these necessary collaborations.

The Interfaculty Committee on Latino Studies also receives support from Provost's Fund for Interfaculty Collaboration. "The Provost's Fund together with the support of the David Rockefeller Center allows us to bring to campus some of the leading scholars in the field of Latino studies," said Suárez-Orozco. In the long run, the committee hopes to establish goals for a postcampaign endowment fund drive.

Through the David Rockefeller Center, the Interfaculty Committee will provide small grants for faculty research; summer research travel grants for undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students; and support for extracurricular cultural activities of student organizations. For information on these opportunities, call DRCLAS at (617) 495-3366 or visit the Center's Web page at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~drclas.

Concilio Latino plans to hold a students-only meeting infor mid- March to generate specific ideas for the next dialogue with Interfaculty committee members.