History
In the fall of 2005, Whitman College undergraduates completed the initial report on The State of the State for Washington Latinos. This document was the first-ever widely inclusive account of social and political conditions for Latinos in Washington State. Spanning issue areas ranging from education to health insurance, from farm labor to housing, and from voting rights to domestic violence, the 2005 report showed graphically that the challenges and inequalities facing Washington Latinos are multiple, interwoven, and deeply entrenched. It also brought to light innovative efforts to solve these problems and sought to stimulate a new resolve by the people of Washington to address them through a comprehensive agenda for racial and social justice.
The State of the State for Washington Latinos: 2006 dramatically expanded the scope of our inquiry, supplementing the earlier report with an entirely new array of research on pressing questions at stake in ensuring a better future for Latinos and all residents of this state. As before, a class of advanced and highly motivated undergraduates at Whitman College, located in Walla Walla, conducted the inquiry.
The Spring 2008 report on The State of the State for Washington Latinos featured a specific focus on Latino voting rights and civic engagement. Four students in the course conducted extensive quantitative analyses of election records in local cities, looking for barriers to Latino electoral success and potential violations of the federal Voting Rights Act. Five other students explored strategies local community organizations could use to promote Latino civic engagement, a necessary step to overcoming voting barriers and realizing a truly representative democracy in Washington communities.
For the Fall term of 2008 we returned to a more diversified research focus, with students pursuing a range of themes broadly related to the standard of living for Latinos in Washington State. Specific reports focused on health policy, safe environments in public schools, immigration and employment, farm worker housing, tax fairness, neighborhood improvement, and access to "green" job opportunities for Latinos.
Building on the success of four comprehensive reports, in Spring 2009 we initiated a new undertaking in our ongoing project on The State of the State for Washington Latinos: a separate semester-long course dedicated to preparing for, conducting, analyzing, and creating new materials about a full and diverse agenda of public outreach activities related to community-based research that students had completed in prior semesters. The central event of this course was a trip to Seattle and Olympia, to meet with and present key research findings to community leaders and state officials in relevant legislative and executive offices.
